Explorer Fails at Login

[sgthomas98]

Help! This weekend my computer froze suddenly so I rebooted and scan disk kicked in, as expected. From there, I entered my password and the login process went along as normal until the desktop background appeared. No desktop icons appeared at all and only part of the task bar and system tray icons appeared and everything at that point. After doing Ctl Alt Del I found that Explorer was not responding, so I ended task and rebooted. Since then, I have booted up at least a dozen times and the same thing happens each time. This seems serious and I am concerned about losing all of my files. Anyone have any insight into this problem? Thanks.

[Phil Rabichow]

1. Reboot.
2. As soon as you see Starting Win98..., press F8 & you should see a menu.
3. One of the options would be to boot to a DOS prompt.
4. At the DOS prompt, type:
scanreg /restore

A screen should come up allowing you to restore up to 5 previous versions of the registry. Pick one that is prior to the crash. This should allow you to reboot.
Hope this helps,

[sgthomas98]

Thanks for your response. The registry approach did not work, unfortunately. What did work, however, was to go into Safe Mode and do a defrag, scan disk and disk cleanup. I'm not sure why this worked, but it did.

[DocWatson]

Probably booting into Safe Mode, the process that was conflicting with Explorer wasn't running and it allowed you to run your utilities that fortunately resolved the conflict. The important thing is that things are working again. <img src=/S/smile.gif border=0 alt=smile width=15 height=15> Nice work around !! <img src=/S/yep.gif border=0 alt=yep width=15 height=15>

BTW - How full is your harddrive ??? If more than 75% and heavily fragmented it will cause all manner and sorts of trouble.