Windows Explorer

[oldbe]

Win2k Pro SP4

explorer exe of a sudden is refusing to Shutdown when turning off the PC. There is notice of a problem with explorer exe and the process reverts to a blank Desktop. Three fingers to get to Task Manager with a Shutdown effective from there.

Suggestions, speculations? The Wallpaper needs to be reset with every Restart and occasionally upon closing a full screen Windows, IE or other. No other problems noted. All apps function just fine.

A home environment with (2) accounts. Administrator and John. Network Identification is set to automatically recognize John as logging on. Hmmm?

Just the explorer exe nuisance as a problem.

Thanks

John

[Harry]

First, make sure you run an antivirus program and a spy software program. If you are lucky, that might fix the problem.

But most likely, your Windows 2000 OS is starting to destruct. Unless you understand the tens of thousands of intricate details of every code in the Registry and how to fix them, the best thing you can do is to put in your Windows 2000 Pro CD and begin the process of installation. It will then give you the option to chose REPAIR. That should fix it. If not, you will have to reformat and that is a bigger pain then you might think if you have to reinstall a lot of programs and then get the updates of all of them from the Web. It's something that may take you weeks to get your system like it was before if you have 40 or 50 programs to restore like I do.

You might have been able to avoid this problem by creating a backup of your entire computer setup with a program called DriveImage.

The other thing you could have done was to create a backup of your registry files. Then when things went sour, you could have changed the file names and used your old working registry.

Try those two things next time.

Windows 2000 pro has a automatic backup registry but only for the last session. So unless you use it right after something goes wrong it is kind of useless. It would be nice if you could somehow hack that registry so that it would stay fixed at a certain point instead of just the last session.

[oldbe]

It was the virus win32 pati b causing the problems.


Thanks for the suggestions, my av didn't do it's job or I had neglected to keep it active what with bouncing on and off the web.

John

Sorry, should have said how I discovered it! Checked the Event log, whenever explorer exe gave a problem it was logged. Boring to read but????