Hmm I had the exact problem about 6 months a go and did work through Taskmanager, it was incredibly annoying, so I backed up what I needed to back up and reformatted the HD, but before doing that, I did something else, its not a solution, but can make life easier, when in task manager, go into processes, end the process called 'explorer.exe' (If you didn't know, thats basically the desktop, task bar etc. what my problem was that something made it crash on start up each time) after closing explorer go back to the first tab, go to new task, and type 'explorer.exe' and then ok, it should open explorer again, you may find at some points it will crash again.
Anyway, to answer the question, there are two ways with XP (that I know) with a start up disk and one with out, someone posted the without one as a reply to one of my threads, no doubt someone will again.
With your PC you should have a start up disc (if not, then your dealer is crap, like the idiots who sold my sister her PC without one) its just a floppy disk, turn off your PC, and then start the computer from there, and then the process is very straight forward as it acts like a wizard, it should format the hard drive and reinstall XP, which can take time
Yey! I removed the sig...
A Llama called Dalai
