BSOD on boot, can't even get into safe mode

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I have WinXP Home SP2 on an HP Pavilion 4200 Notebook, with an AMD1600
and 1Gb RAM.

Things started to go wrong when I got error messages on boot telling me
that winlogon.exe couldn't start because shell.dll wasn't found, and
that msgina.dll failed.
Looked up the problem and Microsoft blamed one of their updates, and
told me to restore the files from the CD. I tried, and of course it
wanted the administrator password. Now, the machine is 2 years old and
I've never once used the admin p/w, but there were only two options as
to what it was and I tried them, upper and lower case. No soap,
password rejected.
So I started to go round the long way and do a complete restore from
the OEM CD. This seemd to load up OK, but when it got to the end and
rebooted for the last time, I got a split-second flash of BSOD halfway
through the boot, and a restart.
And that's all I've had since.
I've tried starting with:
Last Known Good Config
Safe Mode
Safe Mode Networking
Safe Mode Command Prompt
and all do exactly the same BSOD thing and restart. The thing flashes
up so damn fast I can't possibly read the error message.
Now I'm stuck. The only thing I can think of (unless anyone can help!)
is a complete reformat and OS reload, which will lose me 2 years of
stuff . . .

.

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