If you experienced a recently virus infection that may have been called “Virut” and are now experiencing a problem with logging in to your desktop, your antivirus or antispyware protection probably deleted the userinit.exe file.
There is no easy way to get this back without having some experience with troubleshooting computers.
The only advice I can give you is that you have to find a way to gain access to the file system to transfer a fresh copy of userinit.exe back into the C:\Windows folder.
If you have access to a boot disk like ERD Commander or Bart PE, those two will help.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.
I actually had a customer have this very issue. It was an onsite deal, so I had no idea about this Virut virus. One question though, can you use any userinit.exe file from any XP installation?
This is all very good information. I’m glad I found it. It would have saved me a buttload of time if I’d found this earlier.
I wish I had found this post prior to today. I have a SONY desktop PCV-V100G (like the one you have wriiten about) which gave me this problem. I finally decided to use the system restore CD’s to get the thing back – the process says it completed but now the machine will no longer will boot from the hard drive nor the restore CD. The screen stays dark and it issues long beeps every few seconds. Any suggestions?