xp not booting up properly

sham69

Hi,
I have windows xp profesisonal running in a desktop pc thats being used to power my arcade machine that i built.
I was messing around this morning trying to get a program (mamewah) to start on bootup. I saw a tutorial explaining to use regedit and to change HKEYCURRENTUSER/MICROSOFT/WINDOWSNT/LOGON entry.
It said to add a string called shell and to point it to my program that i want to start.
Now xp won't boot to desktop, I can see the startup screens and then loadin settings screen and then it just goes black.
It sounds like it is booted properly but i can see anything.
When I press ctrl,alt,delete I can see what looks like task manager but there is nothing running and no options displayed. The only thing that it has is disconnect,logoff and send message down the bottom of the window and they are grayed out.
I cant access the desktop to reverse the registry entry that I fecked up.
Can anyone help me..
Thanks.
Sham.

Capt'n Midnight

yes you have just painted your self in to a corner by disabling the user interface

restart , F8 and try to choose last know good option

use task manager to run explorer
then start programs accessories system tools system restore and roll back to before you messed it up

sham69

cheers, managed to get into the task manager and regedit.
deleted the string and it booted just fine.

cance

if you get stuck again, simply go to "new task" in task manager and type "explorer".