This is in a friends machine. She had downloaded Mcafee from the ISP's site
and had some things go wrong. (don't ask me I don't know) Based on what
happened she decided to reinstall the operating system.

After two attempt she called for help. She says she has lost the desktop.
"What do you get?" I ask. She replies "nothing"

OK I'll be right over.

Here's what I see. She starts with the CD and the installation starts out
looking normal. Then it comes to the first restart and says it will look for
PnP devices. It begins doing that but never shows it found any and stops
with 16 minutes to go. The screen message says if the systems stops to
restart it . It restarts and continues as before with the timer reporting 14
minutes to go. It stops again and again asks for  restart.

Following this latest restart, all that shows up is a plain blue screen with
no messages. C-A-D shows only two program. one is msgsrv (not responding). I
don't recall the other program. At any  rate, no Explorer, no systray.
Nothing else.

As I see it in person, the problem is that the install did not complete.

How best to proceed?
Formatting is not a happy solution.
Having backed up important files has not been considered.
Is there a graceful recovery?

Charlie