I need help

Hi 4chan. I need help.
I was surfing 4chan, and suddenly I got a virus. It said ''You have a virus'' and then my computer begins wigging out. I can't even access the Start menu, so in a panic I just shut it off and manually rebooted. Bad move.

I restarted, and it won't take me past the Windows XP boot up screen. Windows XP seems to boot up, then I get a blue screen with an error message.

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000034 (0x00000000 0x0000000)
The system has been shutdown.

That is the message.

I ran Drwtsn32.exe and I can now get to my computer, but eventually, it will say something like ''Yeah yeah Winlogon.exe is fucking up, we're gonna have to file an error report and restart this machine'' and then it auto-restarts and goes back to the blue screen. And this happens after five minutes. I try to System Restore. No dice, because due to the fact it can't restart properly, Sys Res can't fully kick in.

So I'm sorry this thing was tl;dr material, but I really need to get at some text files in this computer. Basically I can't get on, and if I can get on, can only be on for like a minute in which I can't do shit.

Someone told me to reinstall Windows XP. Is there some other way? I lost my CD ages ago.

Thanks, 4chan, if someone finds me a way out of this shit they have my infinite and everlasting gratitude.

First of all, how did you get the virus? Using Internet Explorer? Using sketchy P2P? Whatever it was, STOP IT. Use Firefox or Opera, and don't use Limewire or shit like that.

If I were you, I'd download a Linux live CD (like Knoppix) and use that to recover any files you can. After that, reformat and reinstall Windows.

If you've lost your XP install disc, you can either bite the bullet and buy another one, or just fucking download it like everyone else does.

Well, a friend of mine sent it to me accidentally. I use opera and uh, bittorrent.

Yeah I was thinking of running Linux and using it to recover, and I could download XP, but I thought you just had to run it from a CD and I'm all out. Otherwise I'd just burn one right here from my neighbor's laptop and then be in business. You can just download it right from Microsoft's site and just run it? If so, that simplifies things.

Anyway, the reason I asked was because I know ways to fix it, I just wanted to know if maybe there was some faster, better way so I could have it all done real fast within the hour and be able to get back on my computer instead of waiting a day.