Windows XP explorer.exe missing or corrupt
So here’s a new one, recently at work we have had a number of XP Pro machines login but failed to load up explorer. The first thing you would attempt would be to start task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete), start a new task and start explorer. Now when we did that we were getting an error saying that explorer was missing or corrupt. So we opened up CMD to browse the Windows directory only to find explorer was there and seemed fine…
We came across a fix to rename explorer to explorer2.exe and update the registry with regedit to point to the new explorer2.exe. This worked and proved there was nothing corrupt or missing but it wasn’t an ideal solution as it was quite long winded.
The problem started to appear with more and more PC’s on our network, this is no longer a coincidence. The problem is happening on different service packs of SP so we know its not an SP related issue. After doing a bit of searching around I found something called FixO. After running this and rebooting the PC explorer was now working great and it kept explorer as same name etc. You can get it here: FixO - Repair explorer.exe
Still this was a long way around script but at least it can be scripted into the login script. Anyway one of my work colleges found another solution, which seems to cure the problem but no idea why. It’s a simple one-line registry edit.
Open notepad and put the following in:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\explorer.exe] "Debugger"=-
Save the file as a reg file. Then run this file in regedit, this simply removes the offending registry key that is causing problems. If you want you can just get the file here: Reg Fix - Fix No Desktop
So we still don’t know what’s causing this but we do have a temporary solution.
[...] ho trovato la soluzione in questo post: è sufficiente creare un file .reg (qui trovate un .txt da rinominare in .reg) da aggiungere al [...]
We have now found the cause of this. It was a virus going around. Some one was sending emails claiming to the user that they had paid for something for large amounts of money. Many of our users are not intelligent and ended up opening the attachment. We have now blocked the sender and made our users aware of this type of attack.
Thank you so very much. We have a number of clients who are starting to expirence this issue. Since this is a new problem i am sure others will experience it as well.
This was the answer, I have seen many people with this problem. Bully for you guys………..
Thanks guys ive also had the same problem with a laptop. Graet stuff cheers.
P.S be carefull with those attachment people…..
Very good guys, I had not seen it before but your solution works, I removed the virus and on reboot only had a blank screen to look at.
Cheers
I can`t resolve the problem, when I run FixO.exe I have this message “Error encountered while performing the operation Look at the information windows for more details”. Adicional in the screen of the program say “The archive is either in unknown format or damaged
Cannot open C:\Documents and Settings\Demo\Escritorio\FixO.exe” I download the FixO.exe in other sites but the result is the same.
Please Help Me
worked great for me, shame it took me 4 days and a total system back-up before I found this article, thanks guys for a job well done. Why do these idiots think it’s so clever to screw up poor little home users like me????