XP Home...SP3+ eploded and died ...

....well almost died.

Brother tells me that system halted at the "Windows is closing down" sceen,
and after quite a few mminutes did not complete shutdown - so he held in the
Pwr button for 4 sec. (this was before he 'phoned me),
....so hd flagged dirty I suppose, ...

Next start up - chkdsk.exe kicked in and corrected lots of FAT errors
(perhaps?) - which was suspicious,

....anyhow - XP seems to sort have gone back to - as if it's just been
installed, and orig. XP green field, and reports -

Unable to locate component/s for ....
MSASCUI.exe (windows defender?)
NMIndexStoreSvr.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close...

....any idea what's gone bang ? ...any way to fix it without doing a repair
or re-install from scratch ?

TIA

regards, Richard

....sorry to be vague - ....as related to me by 'phone !