Windows XP bizarre problem - Mup.sys hanging issue

I’ve encountered one Windows XP SP2 desktop with weird hanging issue during boot-up. There was no recent software/hardware installation on the box, it just decided to start hanging during boot-up then reboots itself, these steps goes into an infinite loop.

After trying to get into safe mode, I can see it is hanging while loading Mup.sys. However, still no luck can’t even get into safe mode… After various attempts, the only way that I could boot-up the machine is to unplug all USB devices, interesting thing is that once I boot into Windows I can plug all the USB devices back and everything works just fine.

The solution to fix this issue was that I had to backup the files of the current user account, create a new one and delete the current user completely. The magic worked well, I can now boot up back into Windows normally. The cause of this hurts my brain, just another MS Windows myth…