Explorer.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close

[twinmms]

Hi! Newbie here! I'm hoping some of you may be able to help with this. I just performed some basic maintenance to a computer running XP pro. Nothing major at all, just defrag, as well as AdAware to get rid of some pretty innocuos stuff and then critical updates from Windows. The computer seemed to be fine and I had no problems re-booting after the updates from Windows. I shut it down yesterday and then tried to reboot it this morning, and I keep getting the same message over and over -"Explorer.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. blah, blah, blah'. The computer gets all the way to loading the desktop background before the message comes up, but none of the icons, or even the start menu appears. I hit 'okay' on the message box, then...nothing. It doesn't restart, it doesn't continue to load anything else...just sits there. I'm assuming it has something to do with the update from Windows, but how do I fix it?

Thanks for any help! Tara

[s7p9a2m4]

Go to safe mode and run scannow sfc. You will need the xp cd. A system file has been deleted and the previous command should restore it.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;315222

http://www.updatexp.com/scannow-sfc.html