Light at the end of the tunnel??

The problem with my notebook is the immediate-logout problem. In theory you only need to change one or two entries in the registry to fix it. However you need to get to regedit first... Using the remaining battery on the notebook, I boot it using another harddisk, and fix the registry on the original harddisk.

Then I bought a new power adaptor for the notebook. I don't know they are that expensive; perhaps I should actually buy a new notebook instead (the current one is rather old anyway). With power supply, I can finally run the machine a bit longer. Although I can now log in, it still has numerous mysterious behaviour, such as disappeared recycle bin, disappeared control panel items, missing filetype-application associations etc. It looks like somehow it is not reading from / writing to the registry even when you ask it to.

But I can tolerate this, as long as it is stablized. Moreover, I get wireless access from my neighbor... Actually I can't stop it even if I wanted to, because anything about network connections in the control panel (or anywhere else) disappeared... It looks like there is no fix without reinstalling everything, which I would only do later...