Windows XP THINKS it's in Safe Mode

[Pilgrim]

I have very rarely found it necessary to use Safe Mode and nearly two years ago when I used it on my PC I found that when I rebooted out of Safe Mode although it opened to the Desktop a lot of the programs would not load, they all threw up error messages saying that they would not work in Safe Mode?

To cut a long story short I have tried everything upto and including a Repair Install, yet to this day I only have three options for getting out of Safe Mode; Last Known Good Configuration, System Restore, or restoring an Erunt backup.
As the main reason I have ever had to use Safe Mode has been to edit the registry this defeats the object as they all put it back to where it was.

I do not have the faintest idea what caused it in the first place, it might have been like it for a long time before I found out.
Besides my own efforts several people on different forums have put forward ideas including running various programs to bring up system information, none of which showed anything wrong.
The system is not infected and it has no other ongoing problems.

I posted the above in reply to a thread a while back, it lists a problem that I had long since given up on.

When I had my recent run-in with Avira Antivir I remembered that with the free version you need to access Safe Mode to shut down avnotify.exe, so I took another look into the subject.

When I tried to find an answer in the past I must have used several different search terms but I would never have thought of the title of this thread.

A little while ago, purely by chance, I found THIS, I followed the suggested registry deletions, and for the first time in two years I was able to reboot normally after using Safe Mode.

The people in the link all seem to have had the problem after a virus but I have never been aware of an infection of any sort since I built the PC so I still have no idea of the cause.

Almost everyone I spoke to about this finally suggested a clean install which was never an option, but I never expected to find an answer after all this time although I did have a feeling it would be something simple as there were no other ongoing problems.

[Anupam]

Thanks for posting this Pilgrim. This will be helpful for anyone with the same problem.

[Pilgrim]

For those who want the details of what exactly I did:

I ran a search for all registry keys named 'SafeBoot'.
Each key should have two subkeys:
One named 'Minimal' and one named 'Network'.
If there was a third named 'Option' I deleted it.

This was taken from post 14 on page 2 of the link I provided.

On the first reboot it took nearly 10 minutes to boot fully, by the third and after running disk and registry cleaners it was back to normal.