Explorer.exe

[Voximation]

I am running on windows 2000 and about 3 weeks ago i got an infection of a fake spyware program called Spy Dawn. It was throwing up all sorts of fake error messages. I used Hijack This to remove it as well as a registry cleaner known as Eusing to tie up the lose ends. I ran both several times until I was satisfied with the results and then i did an online scan with TrendMicro just to be sure. Apoun rebooting i disvorered that explorer.exe would not run, its still there right where it is supposed to be it just wont startup. I am currently running programs through the taskmanager. For some reason IE wont run but luckily i use firefox. I have no system restore points so thats a no go. For some reason certain programs wont install when i try and wmp is not working at all. It just says i dont have the proper codecs and when i try to download them it says that none are needed/available. I just recently viewed a file called Stubinstaller.exe on my C: dir through the command promt, I googled it and it said that it was some sort of tracking process that avertising programs use, i deleted it. Though I am not sure why none of my many scans picked it up. At this point as far as I can tell I have completly detoxed my computer. No virus's are present according to a bajillion scans from numerous freeware programs and my registry is reading the same way through registry scans, yet still no explorer.exe. I have come to terms with the fact that i may never fix this so i purchased an extra 80g harddrive and a copy of a new Linux Distro iv heard of called Linux XP. Any help or advice would be wonderful. I plan on just copying the files over to my new harddrive and then reformatting the old one for use as a slave storage drive. Any alternatives to this is welcome. If At all possible i would like to leave 2000 on it and just have Linux on one harddrive and 2000 on the other. THnks

[Voximation]

Oh also just wondering, i have Azerus and poweriso and i can still use both of them, is there anyway to use poweriso to mount an iso and then boot from it apoun restart?

[oddjob]

Voximation ... I realise this happened after you fixed spydawn but try these.

1. Have you tried installing a fresh copy of explorer. exe from, say, your master disk?

2. You may have too many things in your startup. Boot to safe mode and disable some items. See if the machine boots into window normally again.

3. Here is a troubleshooting tutorial that may help ...

http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?t=8356

Hope something here helps.


If not there are other things to try but please post a HJT log in normal mode, if you can, so we can at least check to see if there's anything obvious lurking (despite your own confidence that there isn't).


OJ