About a month ago I purchased a new Dell E510. It has a Pentium 4 630 chip and runs Windows XP Media Center.
A couple of weeks ago I had a nasty bout with spyware. According to McAfee Security Center and Windows Defender, all the nasties are out. And everything runs just fine with one irritating exception: explorer.exe does not load automatically on login. This means I get my wallpaper but nothing else – no icons, no start menu, no taskbar. After I use the task manager to run explorer.exe, everything works perfectly. Besides the fact that I don’t really want to manually jump start explorer.exe every time I log in, it makes me wonder if there is a bigger problem lurking in the background.
I ran SFC and it corrected about five or six files, but that did not solve the problem. Which makes me think this is not a case of a corrupt file, but a registry issue. Having been a Mac user until a month ago, though, I am not very familiar with the registry. (Funny, in eight years of owning a Mac, I never once had a virus or spyware attack. I hope the conversion was not a mistake.) Anyway, I know HOW to make manual changes to it, but I am not sure what to change. I have researched the problem online for a week or so, but none of the fixes have proven fruitful.
Does anyone have any suggestions on what this might be?

Thanks!

Your system may still be infected with some nasties.

Go HERE and follow the instructions in the order they are given.

Post a fresh HJT log, only after doing the above.

If it turns out, that you do have a malware problem. I will move this thread to the proper forum.

If it`s not a malware issue, then we`ll try and think of other solutions.

Regards Howard

Howard,
Thanks for the tip. I will follow those steps and let you know the results.

Solved

I scanned my computer with several programs and found no malware.
Eventually I discovered the problem. It was the registry, just as I had suspected. I had simply been overlooking one thing: I was leaving out the quotation marks around explorer.exe when identifying it in the registry as the startup shell [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon].
I hope this will help someone else now.

Glad your problem is solved.

Thanks for letting us know.

Regards Howard

Your explorer.exe problem...

I found a way that worked for me:

1. Start--> Run--> regedit
2. Go to the HKLM/ software/ microsoft/ windows nt/ current version/ winlogin\
3. double click Shell
4. put %windir%\explorer.exe


Good to go!

You should update your antivirus software and run a full scan.

After this, does my method previously described, work for you?
let me know