techrecovery | WTF!? You don't have a run menu? (Reply)

This case probably goes down in the WTF file....just like most of these LJ posts.

Ok...so it goes like this:
(these are just my thoughts, so they don't make sense)
*caller calls in*

She pretty much describes to me what's going on. She notes she can't check her email, and she blurbs out that OE could not find the host pop.XXX.XXX.XXX. So I ask her if her internet explorer is working. So she opens it up, and lo and behold, that's not working. So clearly an internet issue. So I take a look at the signals on her cable modem, signals on modem look fine, and she has a valid ip address with valid lease time communicating with her nic, and I can ping not only her ip, but her default gateway.

So, I figure...what the hell, might as well check the ip address on her pc.

So, I ask her to click start.

She clicks start.

I then ask her to click run.

"You don't have a run option?"

No.

"Ok, well let's try programs>accessories, then should be listed in there."

No, not seeing it.

*This is where i'm thinking wtf...*

Ok, well let's restart the system.

So we reboot, and before we reboot she tells me it's win2k.

Okay cool, so we have a stable OS on it.

While's she's rebooting, it boots into safe mode for some reason.

I ask her to reboot, but don't push anything. This time it boots normally...she notes it's ME.

So I ask for the run menu again...she reads off all the options, but no run menu.

So I take her into search, and search for command.exe.

Nothing found.

So I search for cmd.exe. Also, found nothing.

Somehow her system is screwed up, amazingly, she seems to function just fine.

I gave up after that, I just referred to Dell after that. I'm usually not that bad, but cmon...no freakin run menu?

It's been one of those days guys&girls.

WTF!!!