windows xp start up problems

[mindbullets]

can any kind hearted person help me with this ,my dads computer wil not boot up properly ,he gets a windows box which says ,winlogon exe.and underneath that it says aplication has failed to start because ole.32.dll was not found reinstalling may solve the problem. after clicking ok he is left with his wallpaper with no icons or start menu. any ideas what he should do would be much appreciated.

[jamesmwhelan]

Try to boot in to safe mode to see if you get the same problem (F8 on start-up) and failing that, in the help & support center you can use system restore to go back in time when the problem did not occur...have you installed new software recently? OLE32.DLL may have become unregistered - search the system to see if the file actually exists, if it does, go to a command prompt and type regsvr32 ole32.dll to reregister the .DLL