A looping problem with Windows OS

I refurbished an old computer for my partners granddaughter and it has been running fine until just recently.

The machine was originally an old XP OS until I dropped a faster Pentium 4, an SSD with Windows 7Home, a simple GPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM into it after giving everything a good general cleaning.

Now the granddaughter came to me and said the machine was always coming up with a blue screen and of course I thought the worst but it turns out that whatever the kids have been doing with the machine has really thrown the OS out of whack.

When I got the machine going the taskbar was down one side of the monitor and had half of the desktop showing on the right side of the screen. I soon got it sorted out and back to something resembling normal but I cannot stop it looping to Windows Media Centre after it boots and then try to load anything.

I have tried SFC CCleaner and the usual scans in safe and normal modes all which leave me with the WMC kicking in.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what is causing this to loop over and over? I ask because they have lost the OEM DVD I used to install and although I have an ISO for the Windows Home I cannot find the (nor can they) the activation code or else I would simply reinstall it.

Any ideas really appreciated.

See if Media Player is in the Startup items.

Golden said:

See if Media Player is in the Startup items.

Ok Colin I'll try that if I can get the msconfig up as even the cmd to get the prompt just results in the WMC starting up - it seems anything sets it off

Maybe something got associated with WMC/WMP.

Have you looked at the file associations?

No haven't had chance yet Peter - only found the mess last night. Am going to try and get something done alter today.

Ok Bright Blessings I haven't yet mate as the thing kept opening WMC whenever I touched anything or settings except Control Panel.

So I got to thinking what if I could check out msconfig and the command prompt via a another user account.

By what must be a sheer fluke I set the guest account up typed in msconfig and ran it using the admin password and low and behold there was the start up tab - no WMC in the start up and I found I could run SFC using the same method. I have left it running a chkdsk /f /r and if the machines restarts with the same problem I shall then do a system restore again (as they have a rough idea of how long this has ben happening) using the guest account that allows me to use the admin password. I shall also check out the file association tomorrow as my partner and I have been busy cleaning carpets and I didn't get much chance to look at the machine again until mid evening.

So I am guessing that the other grandkids who are rather young have played with the keyboard and really messed up the set up or that an update has upset the machine.

What is just a little puzzling is why the guest account can run commands using the main admin account but no worry as long as it is working.

The activation code I shall try the Magic Jelly Bean software from Shawn's tutorial to see if it is the one I used as I can usually remember certain sets form memory just not the whole thing.