Restoring explorer.exe on Win XP Home Edition1

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kelvin
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Kelvin

After a nephew installed and uninstalled God knows what on ome of my
machines, explorer.exe is no where to be found.

The machine starts, logs in users but there is no deskop. I can run all
applications from the cmd line, however. The system restore did not resolve
the problem. I suspect I could run msconfig to fix this, but all of the
documentation on the topic speak of using Start, etc to run the
application.

Where can I locate MSCONFIG on WIN XP Home Edition, Service Pack 2?
Also could I copy this from another machine running XP PRO SP2?

If it makes any difference, this machine was purchased from Dell and
therefore does not have a separate OS disk.
 
Kelvin said:
After a nephew installed and uninstalled God knows what on ome of my
machines, explorer.exe is no where to be found.

The machine starts, logs in users but there is no deskop. I can run
all applications from the cmd line, however. The system restore did
not resolve the problem. I suspect I could run msconfig to fix this,
but all of the documentation on the topic speak of using Start, etc to
run the application.

Where can I locate MSCONFIG on WIN XP Home Edition, Service Pack 2?
Also could I copy this from another machine running XP PRO SP2?

If it makes any difference, this machine was purchased from Dell and
therefore does not have a separate OS disk.
Click to expand...

Since you can at least run programs, I would start with a virus scan. If
you don't have a full-featured av or find it too difficult to navigate
to its executable via commandline, try Sysclean (instructions at
website below). Obviously, you'll need to get this from a working
machine. Copy it to your C: drive so it will be easy to find.

Otherwise, here are various things you can try:

1. Can you run regedit.exe from the commandline? If so, you can navigate
to the Run keys under Software>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion for
both the Current User and Local Machine.

2. You can go outside the operating system to work on the registry with:

a. Winternals ERD Commander (very expensive)
b. A Bart's PE - http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

3. You can try copying explorer.exe from a working XP box, but if the
system is infected I don't hold out a lot of hope for that working.

4. From the commandline, you can run the System File Checker:
sfc.exe /scannow [enter]
You are going to need an operating system disk, though. Again, if the
system is infected this isn't going to be useful.

5. Back up any important data and wipe the system, clean-install
Windows. You can back up the data with either method in Item #2 or with
Knoppix, a Linux distro that runs from cd.

Doing any of the above successfully depends on your skill level and your
patience. You may want to take the machine to a qualified computer
professional instead and have your nephew pay for the work (or his
parents if he's really young).

Good luck, and post back if you need more help.

Malke
 
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