No desktop icons, taskbar or right mouse click

[pstierne]

When I turn on my computer, the icons and taskbar show up at first, but then disappear. All thats left is the background. It wouldn't right mouse click either. Someone mentioned that I should replace explorer.exe with a known good one from another computer. I did that, now my computer starts up and goes directly to blue screen of death. Now I don't know what to do! Any ideas?

 

[Daveskater]

Hi, pstierne, and welcome to Techspot :wave:

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With regards to your problem, when your desktop stuff disappears press ctrl + alt + del and click File > New task and type explorer.exe

however if you can't get to the desktop at all try getting into safe mode by pressing F8 a few times before the xp loading screen

 

[pstierne]

Thanx Daveskater. Im in Phoenix az. I tried doing safemode, but like before, it just goes to the blue screen of death. It says:

Stop: d0000034 Unknown Hard Error
Unknown Hard Error
Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump completed
Contact your system administrator...etc...etc..etc

 

[Daveskater]

ok, when you copied explorer.exe over, i don't suppose you made a copy of the old version, either by renaming it or putting it in a new folder etc

 

[pstierne]

No I didn't. Does that mean I'm Screwed? Just to let you know, I have Barts PE Boot disk, so I can still go in and do stuff.

 

[Daveskater]

it doesn't necessarily mean we can't fix it

if you can connect the hard drive of the pc into another working pc as a slave drive then you can back up the files you want to keep then you will have to put the drive back in its own pc and re-install windows, then put the hard drive back in the other pc and get your files back

 

[pstierne]

Is it possible to just delete explorer.exe and use the WINXP SP2 cd to do some kind of repair?

 

[Daveskater]

that may be possible, you can do a repair install with the xp disc but i'm not sure whether that would delete your personal files or not because i've never done one

 

[pstierne]

okay thanx. I guess I'll try that

 

[Daveskater]

ok, but you will want to look up whether it will delete your personal files or not, or just back them up in case