Problems with XP Professional after the recent updates

hey@all,
i've got a somehow tricky question about XP Professional and the last
updates. my sister, in her last year at uni and in the process of writing her
magister-thesis, encountered it and is now left with a non-working laptop
that won't give her the thesis and all her other files back, the last backup
was done two weeks ago. the problem is this:
after installing the latest set of updates, her windows xp won't boot at
all. the machine launches, shows it's own graphics, shows a bluescreen and
restarts immediatly. with f2 she gets to reinstall, a fail-safe start is not
availible. the reinstall, however, is not an option due to the fact, that it
requires a admin-password. and obviously this required password is not the
one i set for her the last time i reinstalled xp for her. we jotted that
down, she tried it in all different kind of spellings and it won't work. how
can that be?

then, she installed a fresh xp on a free partition of her harddrive and
wanted to copy her files with this account onto a backup drive so she could
format the laptop's hard-drive and reinstall everything. but this plan won't
work neither because her old windows copy-protected all her files, which
makes it obviously impossible to copy and use them in the way she would need
it.
the most important file, her thesis, is backed on two usb-sticks and
therefore in security, but she claims that she would need all the files on
the hdd right now, because there are some scans of important books and stuff
like that she hasn't backed up yet.
is there any way to circumvent the copyprotection? and why isn't the
admin-password the one i set last-time? i'm rather speechless right now and
have no clue how to help her anymore. i've never been that deep into
programming and code, that just wasn't my taste. i had a problem of this kind
on my mac once, which was troubled with a corrupt boot-sector. somehow i got
to rescue my files with the assistance of another macbook which we used to
degrade my macbook to a hard-drive and rescue all the files, which weren't
encrypted and worked on a clean install as if nothing has happened. would
something like that work with a windows-xp-machine as well?
thanks for any suggestion, i'd really appreciate it if someone has a tip
what to do now.

Tried booting in safe mode? F8, usually, as soon as you start the laptop?

Or if you've installed wnxp on another partition, see Help>Take Ownership

"alex" <alex.TakeThisOut@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:16919E82-CA9C-496E-A7C1-B6E287868E1D@microsoft.com...
> hey@all,
> i've got a somehow tricky question about XP Professional and the last
> updates. my sister, in her last year at uni and in the process of writing
> her
> magister-thesis, encountered it and is now left with a non-working laptop
> that won't give her the thesis and all her other files back, the last
> backup
> was done two weeks ago. the problem is this:
> after installing the latest set of updates, her windows xp won't boot at
> all. the machine launches, shows it's own graphics, shows a bluescreen and
> restarts immediatly. with f2 she gets to reinstall, a fail-safe start is
> not
> availible. the reinstall, however, is not an option due to the fact, that
> it
> requires a admin-password. and obviously this required password is not the
> one i set for her the last time i reinstalled xp for her. we jotted that
> down, she tried it in all different kind of spellings and it won't work.
> how
> can that be?
>
> then, she installed a fresh xp on a free partition of her harddrive and
> wanted to copy her files with this account onto a backup drive so she
> could
> format the laptop's hard-drive and reinstall everything. but this plan
> won't
> work neither because her old windows copy-protected all her files, which
> makes it obviously impossible to copy and use them in the way she would
> need
> it.
> the most important file, her thesis, is backed on two usb-sticks and
> therefore in security, but she claims that she would need all the files on
> the hdd right now, because there are some scans of important books and
> stuff
> like that she hasn't backed up yet.
> is there any way to circumvent the copyprotection? and why isn't the
> admin-password the one i set last-time? i'm rather speechless right now
> and
> have no clue how to help her anymore. i've never been that deep into
> programming and code, that just wasn't my taste. i had a problem of this
> kind
> on my mac once, which was troubled with a corrupt boot-sector. somehow i
> got
> to rescue my files with the assistance of another macbook which we used to
> degrade my macbook to a hard-drive and rescue all the files, which weren't
> encrypted and worked on a clean install as if nothing has happened. would
> something like that work with a windows-xp-machine as well?
> thanks for any suggestion, i'd really appreciate it if someone has a tip
> what to do now.