I just had another client with that error on his computer. This service call was near California & Devon, almost on Lincolnwood.

The “NTLDR is compressed” error was not fixed by the usual combination of fixmbr and fixboot from the Windows XP Recovery Console.

The common way to fix this OS load problem is to run in the recovery console the command “attrib -c \ntldr” and then reboot. The errors with the ntldr (NT Loader) may come from a lot of reasons: a missing boot.ini (which needs to be restored) or a missing ntdetect.com or from a severely fragmented MFT root folder (which comes from writing a lot in the root folder of the system partition – that should not happen in normal usage – and this issue was fixed in Windows Service Pack 2). Some more technical background is given in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 320397

After solving the boot problem came the usual spyware sweep – this computer was loaded with hidden spyware and adware.