"utils" lacking namespace?

Hi all,
A colleague of mine tried to install the package EMV, which had been
removed from CRAN.
she ran into some kind of trouble, R locked up, and she closed the program.
Now when she starts R, "utils" can't be loaded which of course create
an unworkable environment.
Below I've copy-pasted the error message she gets when starting R.
Any ideas on what went wrong, and more importantly, how to fix it?
  

Many thanks in advance,

Gustaf Rydevik

Ps: She's running R on a WinXP box, if that might be of relevance...



----------------------------
Error : package 'utils' does not have a name space

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Warning message:
package "methods" in options("defaultPackages") was not found Error in
library(package, lib.loc = lib.loc, character.only = TRUE,
logical.return = TRUE,  :
  'utils' is not a valid package -- installed < 2.0.0?

Gustaf Rydevik wrote:

Hi all,
A colleague of mine tried to install the package EMV, which had been
removed from CRAN.
she ran into some kind of trouble, R locked up, and she closed the
program.
Now when she starts R, "utils" can't be loaded which of course create
an unworkable environment.
Below I've copy-pasted the error message she gets when starting R.
Any ideas on what went wrong, and more importantly, how to fix it?

No idea of the details of what went wrong, but it looks as though your
colleague has some bad startup file (Renviron, Rprofile, etc; see ?Startup
for the full list) or has actually damaged her R installation. ?I'd try
re-installing it first, because that's easy, then work through ?Startup and
see if there are some bad files or environment variables messing things up.

Duncan Murdoch