Brady
A moan, a groan, my life story and how me, a technically minded person just can't seem to fit in with anybody.

Windows XP explorer.exe missing or corrupt

September 01st 2008 | Posted to Inner Geek

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:

[html]
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\explorer.exe]
“Debugger”=-
[/html]

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.

* Comments(25)

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  • http://www.l3rady.com Brady

    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.

  • Cotto

    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.

  • James Carpenter

    This was the answer, I have seen many people with this problem. Bully for you guys………..

  • David Appleyard

    Thanks guys ive also had the same problem with a laptop. Graet stuff cheers.

    P.S be carefull with those attachment people…..

  • Ron

    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

  • Carlos

    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

  • bob H

    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????

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  • http://www.pj-chron.com NinjaComic

    Not sure if you guys care about the issue any more or not, but it seems to be a virus that is just out to cripple the computer. That key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\explorer.exe) can actually just be deleted unless you truely want to debug the explorer. This site mentions what it is actually for:
    http://mygreenpaste.blogspot.com/2005/07/image-file-execution-options-good-evil.html
    Since this seems to be the first response that pops when searching for this problem, I though you might want the reason. It is launching a svchost.exe instead of the explorer.exe. Fun trick to play on you geeky coworkers, but a dead machine if you are not.

  • David

    You just saved my life! My work PC running a very spendy piece of hard to setup the software equipment was plagued by this. Thank you so much!

  • Stuart

    Hi, Guys

    I had a virus which was removed by Mcaffe, but now when I start my PC I get the blank screen ( actually I get the usual background phot I applied but no desk top icons or start tool bar etc )- only Task Manager seems to work. I re-installed XP ( repaired, not a full installation ) and it’s still the same.

    I am not very technical, but so how can I download any of the fixes to my PC ? Any advice gratfully recieved !

    Best Regards

    Stuart

  • Dug~

    Blam, after 4 hours and another install of SP3, FIXO did
    it in seconds. Wish I would of found this first.
    That disc is going in the repair bag.

  • pradeep k

    Thank you very much.
    I had a same problem with windows xp. After askinkg login name & password, i was able to see only the wallpaper, no desktop & taskbar.
    I was able to start outllok thru new task by using taskmanager.

    Regards & Thanks
    Pradeep K

  • http://jlaux.org James Laux

    thanks – a quick fix to the problem

  • Dave F

    Thanks – you nailed it. The Registry key was set to the windows movie maker. And oddly enough, CA’s virus scan (when the machine was last usable) trapped movie maker as having a virus. Didn’t put two and two together until I saw the reg key with the movie maker program in it as a value.

    THANKS!
    df

  • http://steve.hendy@googlemail.com steve h

    Thanks guys works a treat

  • arrythmia

    This post pointed me in the correct direction and I was able to solve the same problem. Just one more thing, after I had done the regedit part, explorer still did not start immediately so I deleted explorer.exe in C:\WINDOWS, then tried running explorer again from task manager and it worked like a charm.

    Thanks.

  • manish bansal

    Thank you…

    I had a same problem in window XP now it works fine….

    Thank You…

  • Di

    Thank you so much, you have no idea how much you saved me, after 6 hours of doing everything including reinstalling windows, I found this site. It was fixed in a matter of seconds. If only I found this site sooner.

  • Karl with a K

    Thanks for this fix.
    So far it is working. Unfortunately the problem happened at the worst time possible and I failed an exam. But! My computer is now fixed and I didn’t have to get it re-imaged.

    Thanks!

  • Otis

    Thanks, got hit by a virus and it wiped out the explorer. Your fix solved the problem. Many Thanks

  • DiYKiD

    Thank you for figuring this out… saved me alot of time and my computer!

  • Favha Pds

    thank you so much,
    the information can help my problem
    best regards

  • Omtaydusk

    Right now I’m trying to figure this out and I tried the reg fix and it didn’t work (I’m using my phone so I can view this)
    I ran it and it said “cannot import …. The specifed file is not a registry script
    You can only import binary registry files from within the editor”
    I seriously need this to work cause I have school crap to do and I need like 5 hours to get it done and libraries only offer 2. My computer works with the ethernet cord but wireless is dead without the explorer.exe