I have a problem on a W2K Professional system, and would appreciate any help from anyone knowledgeable.

It's a running system, but the keyboard and mouse simply don't work after booting to 2K. The KB works OK in the BIOS settings screens, and even the F8 key is active in the W2K boot sequence. However, as soon as the 2K kenel is loaded, the keyboard locks up (not even caps lock or Numlock will change state). I have gone through the various startup options after hitting F8 (safe mode, command line mode, troubleshooting, etc.) but in all cases the KB/mouse are still non-functional. If you allow the system to boot completely, then it is possible to see that the system itself is in fact running (eg., insert and Audio CD and the cd player starts up, insert a new USB device and it is recognised and a driver is installed, etc.). Howver, it has apparently got slower, as if it's polling something/timing out.

This situation has come about as a result of having applied a sucessful update from a w2k Pro install CD. This apparently went sucessfully (the details are hazy here). However, at the end, the problems began. One thing I do notice is that a login screen pops up during the boot, with Administrator as the user, but greyed out. It immediately passes on and continues to boot without stopping, which makes me suspicious that it is stuck in some sort of mode where the keyboard is disabled, for instance in an install/update....

I have more info about what I observe, but it would just confuse the issue for now. Has anyone seen this behaviour before? How do you get out of this condition? Anything at all that might be relevant to try and fix this?