Just yesterday afternoon, I discovered that after leaving my computer on for three days, my computer was acting slow and wasn't responding. So, after I tried various attempts at shutting down programs that weren't responding, and the like, I shut off the computer because it was taking far too long to shut down, or even open up the start menu (I was waiting for about three or four minutes after hitting the windows key).

When I flipped on my computer again, it ran through the typical checks and then changed to another screen, instructing me to do one of five things in regards to startup. It tells me to

Start in Safe Mode
Start in Safe Mode with Network Configurations
Start in Safe Mode with Command Prompt
Start with last known good settings
and
Run Windows Normally.

Seeing as how I'm not exactly computer savvy and am living at home with my parents (I'm still in High School, mind you) and have some.. *cough* incriminating files on my computer that I would rather my father not see. :o These files are on my D: drive, which I'm assuming there's little to no problem with.

So aside from having my computer start up, I would like to know if there's any way (without PCanywhere) to get into my computer to get rid of those files before I get in a mite of trouble.

Considering that you were talking about the system being slow I think your computer is infected with spyware and viruses, things that eventually led to the crash.

Question: Can you go in Safe Mode?

No. I cannot. Every time I try to start any of the startup reccomendations, it shows the Windows XP startup screen for about 5-15 seconds before rebooting itself

I think there's a very high chance that it is a virus. Our other computer caught one about a month or two ago and we had the same issues with it.

If you have your Windows XP cd boot from the cd and go into the Recovery Console.

In there you will be able to perform a manual System Restore if you follow this article:

http://www.toughadmin.com/article.php?article=System

Restore your system to an older restore point when it wasn't running so slow.

If that doesn't work or if you don't care for the data you will be able to either erase the d: partition completely using "format d:" or erase the whole operating system and resolve all the problems. You can find guides on how to install the OS on this website:

www.windowsreinstall.com

Thank you so much. I'll try this as soon as I find the recovery disk. You've been a tremendous help. If I need any more help, I'll come straight here!

I found the disks, but found that all of our boot disks are on floppies. Is that going to make any difference in the way I set it up to run?

If you want to erase the data from the d: partition only, boot from the floppy disk and at the a: prompt type "format d:"

If you want to recover your system and data while you are at that advanced options menu insert the OS cd in the top drive then restart your computer and if you get a press any key to boot from the cd message hit enter right away.

If you don't get the message you need to change the boot order in BIOS.

For that usualy you have to hit F2 to go into the system setup and in there follow the instructions to make the cd the first boot device.

By the way what kind of computer do you have? Is it OEM: Dell, Hp..?

my computer is a gateway that we got in 2000. We've since done upgrades and many reformats (Mostly due to winME) and replaced the motherboard as well as many other parts inside since then.

Were you able to boot from the cd or the floppy?