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General discussion

vista explorer.exe won't load at startup

by kittens_bullie May 1, 2009 11:48PM PDT

Hi everyone,

i have a problem with my vista home premium pc as described on the title,

when i restart the pc i get to the welcome screen and my documents folder loads up but the background is completely black, no desktop/no taskbar,

I can restore my system to show the desktop by navigating to the windows folder and clicking on Explorer.exe, after this my system works as it should. So i am guessing when i start my system windows doesn't load explorer.exe

I have tried loading explorer.exe into the startup but still nothing,


has anyone experienced this before?
what could i do?

many thanks for your input in advance

Discussion is locked

3 Posts
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SAme HERE!
by chriswillb2 May 2, 2009 10:39PM PDT

Thankks for posting this it's exactly the same as what's happening withh me. it started ever since i installed my new graphics card i think it's because it has put the ati catalyst software in my bootup folder. what i normally do now is start explorer through taskmanager. And it's good to know i'm not the only one. I wonder why it's doing this?

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sleep mode
by kittens_bullie May 5, 2009 1:12AM PDT

I have been trying to find out what the problem was but I am not sure,
apparently there are many things that can cause this i.e.
bad microsoft update
graphics drivers
virus
bitdefender

at the moment i can get me desktop icons back by opening explorer.exe manually, to make things easier i keep the pc on sleep instead of shuting down until I do a clean install of vista.

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bitdefender
by kittens_bullie May 5, 2009 1:34AM PDT

sorry not bitdefender,

windows defender, vista defender or something along those lines


but i am pretty sure it was a virus that corrupted the system as initially i couldn't even load anything past the welcome screen so i removed the hard drive and connected it to my laptop via an external drive enclosure to do a virus scan. I scanned with a trial version of kaspersky and it found 6 instances of the same trojan spread around the system folders, i forget the name of it now, after removing the virus i was able to load the my documents folder after the welcome screen from where i can access the explorer.exe

it might be just my vista experience but i feel if vista gets infected with a virus it's more destructive than XP, nothing seems to work as it should after a trojan attack, don't get me wrong if the system is clean it's great to work with but after an infection the only option is to do a clean install.

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