The aim of this article is to show you how you can run applications at the login screen of Windows XP (And probably other versions of windows). This is useful if you get locked out of your system and you need to run recovery tools, or in my case, your installation of windows decides that its activated, but wont let you log in until you activate, which it wont let you do because it thinks it's activated. In this article I will be showing you how to run Command Prompt at the login screen.
Make sure that before you change ANY files that you make a backup of the original file.
First of all, you need to mount the hard disk into another machine. Start the machine from its own primary hard disk and Browse to (where X: is the letter of the drive you are trying to rescue)
X:\WINDOWS\System32
Replace the following files
X:\WINDOWS\System32\sethc.exe X:\WINDOWS\System32\dllcache\sethc.exe
with
X:\WINDOWS\System32\cmd.exe
Put the hard disk back into its machine and start up, when you hit the login screen press shift five times and you will be presented with a command prompt.
From here, you can start explorer by typing 'explorer' and hitting enter. Be warned that for some reason all running apps get killed randomly.
The reason this works is because normally, when you press shift five times, it enables sticky keys, an accessibility feature for people with one hand who cannot do complex key combinations (such as [CTRL] + [ALT] + [DEL]).