XP boots to black screen for minutes

[BBdevil]

I have a Vaio SZ110 Notebook with XP home. It is about a year and a half old. A few months ago it was accidentally dropped on the CD drive and although it broke the cover, the door will still open. When I click on my computer though, the drive isnt recognized. I ignored this up until today thinking simply that it was broken. Randomly, the drive re-installed itself today letting me know new hardware was installed and ready to use. I allowed the system to re-boot, and after the windows loading screen appeared the screen went black for several minutes. Thinking it had froze, I held the power button and manually restarted it, choosing to re-start with the last known good configuration. It booted to the black screen again, only this time I allowed it time and after 5 minutes, I was able to log in, and then sat at my desktop background with no icons or task bar. 5 minutes later, they all appeared though some programs would not open.

I restored the system to yesterday, but it does not seem to have fixed it. Program take 5-10 minutes to open if at all, but work properly once they do. Its running very unstably and crashes often forcing me to wait as long as 20 minutes to restart.

I read through a few threads on here and ran the event viewer which turned up a cdrom error every few seconds:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Cdrom
Event Category: None
Event ID: 11
Date: 1/16/2008
Time: 4:02:35 PM
User: N/A
Computer: TANNER
Description:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\CdRom0.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 00 02 68 00 01 00 b8 00 ..h...¸.
0008: 00 00 00 00 0b 00 04 c0 .......À
0010: 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0028: 8e a0 04 00 00 00 00 00 ......
0030: ff ff ff ff 02 00 00 00 ÿÿÿÿ....
0038: 40 00 00 c4 02 00 00 00 @..Ä....
0040: 00 00 0a 12 48 00 00 00 ....H...
0048: 00 00 00 00 88 13 00 00 .......
0050: 80 01 2d 87 58 e8 c0 85 .-XèÀ
0058: 00 00 00 00 08 80 cf 85 .....Ï
0060: 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0068: 25 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 %.......
0070: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0078: 70 17 04 17 00 17 00 17 p.......
0080: 08 17 00 17 3e 17 00 17 ....>...
0088: 00 17 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........

There are tons of error messages from explorer.exe, almost daily:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: (100)
Event ID: 1000
Date: 1/8/2008
Time: 12:23:32 AM
User: N/A
Computer: TANNER
Description:
Faulting application explorer.exe, version 6.0.2900.3156, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x02dd4680.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 65 78 70 ure exp
0018: 6c 6f 72 65 72 2e 65 78 lorer.ex
0020: 65 20 36 2e 30 2e 32 39 e 6.0.29
0028: 30 30 2e 33 31 35 36 20 00.3156
0030: 69 6e 20 75 6e 6b 6e 6f in unkno
0038: 77 6e 20 30 2e 30 2e 30 wn 0.0.0
0040: 2e 30 20 61 74 20 6f 66 .0 at of
0048: 66 73 65 74 20 30 32 64 fset 02d
0050: 64 34 36 38 30 d4680

I backed up my documents on a USB drive, but I dont have the space to save all of my pictures, videos, ect. I will buy an external hard drive if I need to reformat, but I would like to do that as a last resort. Can someone please give me any ideas?

[BBdevil]

meant to include that I have virus protection.

Is the cdrom issue causing these problems? It seems like it is my registry which I dont know how to fix without doing a full reformat.

Also, it has been a long time since I have updated windows. However, I cannot download the SP's because IE will not open.

[BBdevil]

Just found automatic updates have been on and all SP's are installed. IE finally ended up opening.

Should I try registry mechanic or install windows restore only? Im updating and running adaware now. I doubt it will help, but its been a while.

I searched and tried to find the driver for my CD rom drive, but all I could find was an update for it, which I didnt think was right.

[BBdevil]

I ran glarysoft registry repair from download.com, seemed to be the highest rated which "fixed" nearly 700 problems. Adaware found 28 issues, all of which were tracking cookies. I am defraging my HDD now.

All of this seemed to help. Programs are opening slightly faster and it has been several hours since the last crash.

Still, I would appreciate some input.

[BBdevil]

ttt

[bobbyraw]

if you can get online while the pc is up do a windows updat, then restart, if that fails I suggest you do a reinstall of XP, do you have the win XP cd, explorer is currupted and olny a reinstall can fix it, restart the laptop, go into the bios and set the boot order to cd then HDD, pop the cd in and do a reinstall

[BBdevil]

Thank you for the reply. I dont have an xp cd as my laptop has a partition to re-format from. Can you give me instructions on how to do this?

[hughv]

Your CD ROM is almost certainly causing this as evidenced by the event viewer errors. I would remove it at least temporarily and plan on replacing it.
The Sony site is easy to navigate and has a link to using the recovery partition.