Has anyone ever experienced or came across a PC who's Exploer and Internet Explorer was not working? Well mine is going through that right now. When the PC boots up it loads after the logon screen - all i see the the desktop background with no icons or taskbar. I can do the Ctrl + Alt + Delete to start tasks. I've tried the following the remedy the situation.

Safemode.... Nope
Boot back normal- Boot to last good known config -- no luck
System restore - no restore points to fall back to (I saw some at first, but didn't think I'd think this was going to be that bad; now they're gone... rats )
Ran the AVG virus scanner, came out clean.
Ran highjack this... seemed ok
Replacing the explorer (copy and paste) from another working XP machine (I restarted it just to make sure, nothing)
Manually added the irtutil.dll runtime to C:\windows\system32\ (nothing)

Well I'm kind of out of options. I think I may need to backup the data to a USB and try the dell recovery CD. (I hate thoughs recovery cd's and the whole babysitting the recovery)
If you can help, thanks in advance.

levimage

Could have been a spyware. I believe you must have also tried to run explorer.exe from task manager. Have you try running automated recovery from window's setup disc. It might help. Since this failure might involve quite a lot of system files and registry setting, merely replacing explorer.exe would not help.

If you need to backup your file, you can start window with "Safe Mode with Command Prompt". It will start window with a command prompt and nothing else. From there you can copy/backup your files to another drive or thumb drive so you can proceed with a full recovery.

Have you tried making a new account and see if Exploder (I mean Explorer) is defaultly shown? If so, then your account is bugged. If not, reformat.

xboxrulz

I guess I can look into the new account thing. I've actually experienced bad accounts in the past like NT and 2000. But yeah, I booted from the xp home cd and I did not choose recovery (1st option), I chose repair (second) - which replaces the installed files with the one from the CD -- (Did not reinstall the OS, even though it had that option). The problem still exists. I think the recovery option is like if you make a recovery disk or restore point - which I don't have.

So I guess I can take 40 minutes for a reinstall or do the user account thing. I hope the explorer situation did not affect the 'default user' or the all 'users account'. I shall post my results on what I find. Wish me luck.

Yeah I had to reinstall it. I turns out I could not bring up an explorer like interface which contains the control panel apps. I'm sure there is a way to do it Using XP Home edition. I'm just use to typing 'lusrmgr.msc' in XP Pro. Well that feature was not available in the Home Edition. So yeah, I got a clean install. Thanks for the ideas - it kept me thinking.

I've seen this problem before and (in my case) the problem was that the owner of the computer had deleted a few registry entries because those where linked to some spyware/adware. The result was that I could run almost nothing, not even the system restore. I fixed this using a self made live-windowsXP cd and using a small tool that does the same thing as the system resore. One reboot later and everything was up and running again

Ultimate Bootcd 4 win, never go without one: http://www.ubcd4win.com/

did you try system restore using the windows xp instalation disk or the restore application in windows, if the second than I would recomend using the windows disk to restore by going and opening the disk when you boot the computer and clicking install window now, when it gets to the partitioning part click on your windows partition cand click repair. otherwise it is most likely sypware, if you can't solve the problem entirely i would recomend getting profesional help, a pro can get all your files, re instal windows and put everything back the way you had it for you.