my laptop will not load up to start screen

[nickie]

Hi my laptop will not load up..A black screen appears ..asking to select the operating system when I do select ..it acts as if it will start up....windos xp..shows up on the screen...then an error message saying the application or DLL: windows/system32/shlwapI.dll is not validwindows image.Please check against your installation diskette...can someone please help..

[zeroth]

First, have you tried to do a software update lately...this error is associated with a failed SP2 update to Windows XP.

[nickie]

How do I go about doing a software update where do I begin

[nickie]

dont mean to sound dumb founded but i would appreciate ur help......with the software update,,,,asap....bcuz i use this for school and I am tired of losing everything

[Catalana]

you need to start the machine with the windows CD...when you get the choice of startup location, choose the CD...there are diagnostics that you can run to see what happened.

If you have automatic updates set on your system, Service Pack Two might have been loaded and the update failed...you're going to have to do a system restore back to the checkpoint before the update.

[ici]

same thing happened to me and system restore worked