Hi there,
I hope someone can help and I’m afraid this is going to be a long explanation!
Yesterday morning I started having big trouble with my other computer (HP DV5000, Windows XP SP2 Home) after rebooting. Before switching off I’d downloaded the latest Microsoft updates as well as uninstalling Nokia PC Suite and cleaning the registry with CCleaner.
After rebooting, my desktop would not appear. All I got was the wallpaper and when I tried to load explorer.exe from Task Manager it told me it couldn’t find it or maybe I didn’t have the permissions. I got the same results in safe mode (and last good configuration), so tried a few different things:
‘Merging’ a CCleaner registry back-up – no change.
System Restore – didn’t work.
sfc /scannow – no change.
Virus scan – clean.
Antispyware scan – clean.
chkdsk – no change.
Eventually, I made a copy of explorer.exe, renamed it and ran it. All it gave me was My Documents, which for some reason now loaded with all my Internet Explorer BHOs (google toolbar, McAfee Site Advisor, Linkscanner). I read online that some people solved a similar problem by uninstalling the google toolbar, so I uninstalled all those BHOs – didn’t help.
(Maybe I should add here that Internet Explorer is the only other program that fails to run through Task Manager)
I then tried System Restore in safe mode and it worked this time, but only in safe mode. That’s to say, explorer.exe runs automatically in safe mode, but still not in normal mode.
I then copied a version of explorer.exe from this computer onto a USB key and ran it on the HP. This worked! I removed the seemingly faulty explorer.exe from the Windows directory and put the new one in, stopped the explorer.exe process running from the F: drive and ran the one in C:. This also worked and I thought my troubles were over. But, upon rebooting, I found myself right back where I was. Explorer.exe still refuses to run from the start or from Task Manager and the best I can do is to run it from a USB key.
The only other thing I can think of to mention is that when I successfully ran Internet Explorer (after running explorer.exe from F:), there was a message saying McAfee Site Advisor could not start properly and the icon was still there in the toolbar, only greyed out. Perhaps it did not uninstall properly (I have it for Firefox as well, maybe linked) but I get the feeling there’s more going on here.
Unfortunately, I don’t have XP recovery disks. There is an OEM version on a separate drive and the last time I had to use that it deleted all my files.
Sorry for the long explanation, but hopefully that might give some more knowledgeable people than me an idea of what is going on. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!