Morning.

My husbands laptop suddenly died. He's got a Dell, OS is Windows XP. I don't know anything else about it. Yesterday he listened to an audio cd and then just surfed the net in the evening. This morning when he turned it on, it booted to a blue screen with the following message:

STOP: c000021a {FATAL SYSTEM ERROR} The session manager initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc000026c (0x00000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down.

I tried F8 to Safe Mode, F8 to Start Windows Normally, and F8 Last known good configuration; but I get the same blue screen and error message.

Is there any hope for this machine? I'm curious, what makes a computer just die this suddenly?

As always, thanks for all your input! Happy New Year!

Daugust

There are ways to repair this as it is really an operating system error...
1) you will need to install another version of the operating sytem and use it to open and edit the registry of the damaged system.

2) since this option of number 1 requires that an additional operating system be installed anyway..sometimes it is just faster and easier to just reformat and reinstall.

Thanks Lurks,

At this point I think we're just going to re-format. Thanks for all your help.