I have a Win XP machine that has work pretty well for two years or more. Lately it has become difficault by pausing or being slow. I have had some experiences with it where it just stopped. The final straw has come now when I select shutdown and turn off before it stopped booting, it would get to the windows is shutting downscreen and never turns itself off. It reminds me of the Win98 shutdown problem.
I have reloaded the Win XP system. It went smoothly. After rebooting for the system to start running, the system comes to a blank desktop pattern and fails to load any icons or to show the task bar. The only way out is to do contro-alternate-delete and tell it to shut down.
Its behaviour after the reload of windows is precisely the same as before I reloaded windows.