Only boots up after CHKDSK

This is a strange one, thats been bugging me for a few days.
Hopefully someone can shed some light.

Running Win XP Home SP2, and the machine has been hanging on the
welcome screen on startup, and then spouting various errors like:

userinit.exe - failed to initialize
explorer.exe - failed to initialize
lsass.exe - registry entry could not be read/written to etc...
taskmgr.exe - failed to initialize, vdmdbg.dll cannot be found.

So, I can't get into windows, unless (and this is weird), a CHKDSK is
run, and then the next reboot is successful! The system seems to
decide itself when a CHKDSK is required.

Things I have tried:

*. Boot into Safe Mode - sometimes it works, others it doesn't. If I
choose Administrator on user selection screen in safe mode, it just
hangs when 'getting the preferences' etc... Choosing 'Owner' mostly
works.
*. I have run Norton AntiVirus scans when I get into windows, all
clear. I've run Sypot and Adaware too, all clear.
*. Done a disk defrag, pc doctor tests (motherboard etc...), all
clear.
*. Removed all Startup items using msconfig, restarts fine and boots
up, but won't boot properly after a shutdown/power down! So I don't
think it's the Startup items where the problem is.
*. Check for the wasupdater.exe problem, but userinit.exe entries in
the registry are ok.

I recently installed windows defender, and I think thats when the
problems started. I also recently installed Office 2003, and got all
the updates installed too from Automatic Updates. I un-installed
Defender, but problem still there. Could be an Office - XP issue? Is
it worth replacing these exe's (userinit, explorer) with originals
using XP recovery console expand command?

Any ideas?

Thanks!
S.

.

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