Hello everybody. This is my first post here so bare with me. I'm working on a friend's computer. Its a Dell laptop with XP Media Edition. She was having problems with it giving her occasional error messages and running slowly. She had McAfee on it and a scan gave me no results. I then installed Ad-Aware and found a bunch of nasty things. I deleted them and rebooted and thats where all the trouble started. About 25% of the time I can get the computer to boot into safe mode. The rest of the time, it just freezes. It will not boot like normal. It gets to the welcome screen and gives me an error message saying that something in the registry is missing that is required to load the profile. Then it just sits there until I finally shut the thing off. When I can get it into safe mode, everything seems to be in working order. The computer did not come with any sort of recovery or OS disk. I'm starting to get a little frusterated because I don't know what to do next. I don't want her to have to pay somebody to reinstall XP for her but I also don't want her to have to go buy the program. What should I/can I do?

Hi Fold
Welcome to PC Help Forums

I'm not surprised your frustrated as without the disk to run a repair your pretty much in a hole.
She didn't get it from PC World did she?
I doubt whether it would be legal or even possible to borrow a disk just to re-install the missing files.
If not then it's time to buy a new copy.