I have an old Windows XP Pro computer. It boots up and I can log on without any problem.
Some seconds after log-on, everything including all the shortcut icons and the bottom task bar on the screen disappears. It looks like the explorer.exe has terminated.
This time I have brought up the task manager before things disappear. I noticed for sure the explorer.exe has definitely terminated.
Every time I re-start the task explorer.exe it would only stay up for a little while, not enough time for me to do anything.
Then I found http://www.squidoo.com/explorer-exe and http://www.ehow.com/how_4592369_problem-windows-xp-taskbar-disappears.html which were essentially the same. I followed that and copied an “explorer.exe” from a good XP system and pasted to the Windows directory exactly as instructed. When I restarted I got the error message “The procedure entry point SHCreateThreadRef could not be located in the dyynamic link library SHLWAPI.dll.”. So I overwrote the original suspicious “explorer.exe” with the known good one and changed the registry entry back to what it was. However the same error message came up. I just want to get it back up and running so that I can scan for virus or for whatever it may be.
