damaged explorer.exe

shifty · 23 Aug 2008 at 19:23

Hi guys im in a bit of a hole and I cant get out, basically I picked up a nasty case of a trogen and in wiping it of it heavily damaged files on my OS the main one being explorer.exe , which doesnt load on startup it does manually but that no good , ive been doing a bit of googling and I need to repair it but I cant figure out how,

So can anyone help.

marc2003 · 23 Aug 2008 at 19:33

which doesnt load on startup it does manually but that no good

it could be that the registry entry that sets explorer as your shell that has been buggered.

open regedit and look under

HKLM\software\microsoft\windows nt\currentversion\winlogon

look at the entry for shell. it should be

Explorer.exe

if that's ok look under HKCU instead.

shifty · 23 Aug 2008 at 19:35

I appologise for my ignorance but regedit is that an xp tool or do I need to download it.

marc2003 · 23 Aug 2008 at 19:37

it's built into every version of windows (start, run, regedit)

it's a very powerful thing so be careful. you can seriously **** your system up if you mess with it.

edit: as you're not familiar with it, HKLM means HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, HKCU means HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

shifty · 23 Aug 2008 at 19:39

found regedit but that command line you wrote is not there

marc2003 · 23 Aug 2008 at 19:42

see my edit regarding the abbreviations i used.....

the whole path upto winlogon should be there. if shell does not actually exist, simply right click in the right hand pane and select new>string value. name it

shell

now set the value to

explorer.exe

and restart your pc.

edit: you are logged on as an administrator i hope?

shifty · 23 Aug 2008 at 20:16

No dice the shell file was there on HKLM and was set as explorer and I had to stick it in on th hkcu option you sugested rebooted but no change.