Help please, Windows 2000 SP4 & Roll-up problems

I am writing with my Windows 2000 Professional system in protected mode as
nothing else works just now. I foolishly downloaded and installed Windows
2000 SP4 and SP4 Roll-up on my 3 networked machines, shut them down and went
on vacation for a week. On startup, (the first boot since installation of SP4
& SP4 Roll-Up) the desktop on 1 of the machines failed to appear with the
message: "Can't find file "null" (or one of its components). Make sure file
name is correct and all required libraries are available."

Desktops on the other 2 machines appeared but did not work correctly. In
standard mode, clicking on start and then control panel did nothing. The
applications that
still worked were glacially slow.

In protected mode, desktop appeared with some functionality problems. An
icon appears in the lower left tray "Show Desktop" but it doesn't do anything
obvious in either mode.

I tried to check the history of downloaded updates on the MS Update site for
a date and time associated with the updates to check to see if I had
installed
them in the correct sequence. (Control panel "Add/Remove Programs" does not
show dates for these updates.) Got error 0X8007041D. There is a log file
under C:\WINNT NTfor SP4 Roll-up but I can't find a similar file for SP4 to
compare the dates and times. I don't understand the logs so they are not much
help to me.

Attempting to turn back the clock, in safe mode, "reboot with last known
good configuration" made no obvious improvement. On one machine I
un-installed SP4 Roll-Up but that made the desktop disappear in normal mode
so I did not continue to un-install SP4 on the other 2 machines.

My portable external backup drive does not seem to want to mount in safe
mode so my belated backup attempt is stalled until that is sorted out.

Suggestions will be very much appreciated. Thanks!
--
alancello


.

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