WinXp not properly booting.

In short:

I switch on my PC.
Windows Xp boots.
It stops loading when my desktop background shows up Nothing else loads up. I thought it may have been because my hard drive was alost full, but I left it for a couple of hours and nothing changed.

I'm running XP Pro with SP2 and all the latest updates.

I can boot into safe mode with the WinXP CD and that works fine after I open the recovery console and use the fixboot command. I don't know if this will allow me to boot into normal Xp (I just pick the Safe mode option when it pops up).

Any help would be good

I think I'd probably suggest running the System Restore tool from the Safe Mode command prompt (if you can boot into Safe Mode, then you can just run the System Restore tool from there). Boot to the Advanced Options menu (by hitting the F8 key directly after POST), and select to boot to Safe Mode with a command prompt | Log on to your computer with an administrator account, or with an account that has administrative credentials | Type the following command at the command prompt, and then press ENTER:

%systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

...then just follow the instructions that appear on the screen. You could also try booting using the Last Known Good Configuration, which is also an available option in the Advanced Options menu.

...and if all else fails, try performing a repair install of XP...

How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install
http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

The system restore didn't work. Nor did the last known good configuration.

However, I did make a new username in Safe Mode and this appears to work fine. I'm going to logoff and try my username in a minute, so maybe it's just buggered?

You more than likely have a corrupt profile. Since you've already created a new profile for yourself, you'll just need to copy your files over to the new profile. This MSKB article explains how to do that...

How to copy data from a corrupted user profile to a new profile
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811151/

Thanks for the link. I've copied over my files to a new username. The only downsides are that there's still some tweaking to get my settings back to how they were and now I'm stuck with the directory 'Stephen_2' lol But I'm glad all my stuff is safe.

Thanks for helping