Hello World:
I am a first time caller, long time listner, running 32-bit Windows XP SP3 on an AMD Sempron 3400+. (Don’t laugh) Explorer won’t load. The symptoms are thus:
I recently un-installed an old UBISoft game called Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and then restarted my computer. On the way down I heard the familiar sound that windows always makes however, on the way up, there was no sound. I rebooted the computer a couple of times and sure enough, the Creative X-Fi card would only produce sound as Windows was signing off. I re-installed the sound drivers from cd and rebooted but when I clicked on various music apps they all said something to the effect that there was a certain file/object that could not be located.
I rebooted again after reinstalling drivers and I actually heard that opening startup windows sound but was not prepared for what came next.
I have no icons, system tray, start menu or quick launch bar. Just nothing but wall paper and no icons.
I hit ctrl-shift-esc to bring up task mangler and explorer is not on the list. While I had taskman running though, I noticed only about 32 out of 48 tasks running. I brought down the taskman menu to run the command line type of stuff like explorer.exe and cmd and sfc /scannow but it’s not having any of it. Taskman just blinks out of site. I can bring it back no problem but it won’t let me enter commands through it.
I also can use the winkey-u command and it works. And of course the sound works.
So, I rebooted to safe mode with command prompt and tried to run sfc /scannow and it says RPC server unavailble. I thought maybe a digital certificate might be preventing explorer from loading (based on a quick google search and a trip to microsoft) so I ran mmc and added the certificate snapin and checked out the trusted root cert called NO LIABILITY ACCEPTED and its there. It shows that it’s been expired since 2004 but I checked a few other computers and they all look the same except of course they work.
So, after running chkdsk /r and seeing that yes, a few files did get moved around (but I couldn’t tell which ones) I rebooted and the situation was unchanged.
So, I did an XP repair type of install (twice now), all to no avail. The memory and mobo check out. Video card is fine. Even with limited options, I was still able to run Eusing Free Registery Cleaner and the there doesn’t really seem to be any problems with the registery. It looked pretty clean. I reinstalled explorer.exe in both places \Windows\system32 and \Windows\system32\dllcache\ and file sizes match at 1,000,960 bytes which is what they were before.
For some reason, I don’t seem to have any restore points. The only thing I can think of is that something software related is keeping explorer from loading.
The only other symptom I can think of is that the system tray was acting up once in awhile by not showing all the icons that should be running however, all the icons were showing prior to my reboot while messing with the Creative Labs install disk. I still have sound though, no problem their. A clean install is not an option.
Please help.
