totally F'ed, I have no idea whats wrong, do you?

thanks for being interested enough to click lol
my sister has a laptop. since info about it seems to be important, its a really wide one, it says intel inside pentium 4, and designed for microsoft windows Xp, and its made by toshiba. my aunt who runs TSI computers got it for my sister about a year ago? 04 or 05... Not very aged, although tech moves fast...
so the problem is this. kelly(my sister) left her comp in her car overnight on a cold night. when she brought it inside it didnt startup properly, so she shut it off and left it for about a day and a helf to thaw and get the condensation out,(whats the word for that btw? uncondesnse...lol is it part of the water cycle?)
Anyways, she starts it, it works for a bit in startup then when she tries internet access, its a no-go. she shuts down and tries again. eventually she gets less and less of a working pc, soon, it wont even load her start page, it just asks for her to logon, then says it doesnt recognize her and that its gonna put her in a guest or something of the like, then bam it goes black and like, freezes. as of right now, this is what happens, this is what i see:
1. i hit on, a whirring sound commences and lasts about 4 seconds.
2it says windows xp and has the three little bars that roll left to right to show its loading. theres little copyright thingy and the microsoft logo. this lasts (with whirring sound) about 40 seconds.
3. it goes black, keeps whirring. whirring stops at 40 secs, still black. cursor appears after about 50 secs from when it went black,
4. 30 secs later the 'windows XP home edition user name /password to log on to windows appears and waits for me. I can click options, or shut down, or ok. I put in kelly password and...
5. its 'loading my personal settings' 16 secs.
6. a screen pops up which ive never seen before until JUST now, it reads: user environment' and tells me it wont log me on but it will log me on as default.
7. continues with loading my personal settings screen .
8. Now its got a background that i guess kelly put up,( its a landscape but its with a digital camera, didnt come with the comp..)
9. boom, a window: "Explorer.EXE application error
Application failed to initilaize properly (OxcO150002) Click ok to terminate the application."
10. i hit okay, and all i get is the background and cursor(which does move) and no respoense to any keys i hit. like step 8.

ANY clues? i need to start hunting for solutions somewhere, any keywords i could search would be great. thank you very much!!
- lovelovelove, Kim

 

The Toshiba Laptops here at Germany are delivered with a recovery-CD for Windows XP. You need to replace this 'explorer.exe' may be more. Nobody out there in Ontario, who can help you?

 

I think you should use the XP install CD to fix the problem.

 

Can you boot into safe mode? Explorer.exe will probably still fail. I'm just curious if it is some sort of driver or startup app.

 

kel said she tried it in safe mode and it still wouldnt work. im getting some help from my friend ryan and i think he's going to reinstall windows...
i'll tell you how it ends

 

perhaps you should try reinstalling windows

 

If you're lucky it's just a windows problem, but by the sounds of it it's more like a mechanical problem.

from the whirring you're hearing... sounds like a fan/hard drive problem. If the fan's buggered ur processor will overheat causing your explorer crash and the deteriation.. if it's the hard drive it explains the long loading times/crashes etc...

does the laptop do a self test when you turn it on (like detecting hard/cd drives and checking ram)?

 

I'm not as technical minded as others in this forum, so I can't help you with the PC, but...

Do you mean evaporate?

 

okay ryan came over, and we tried re installing and that didnt work, so he had to erase everything, put windows in, then download all the stuff from the toshiba website..
things are smooth now. thanks guys.