I was tasked with fixing a system that has so far stumped me.

Dell Inspiron b130
Win XP Home

After starting up and the desktop being visible for ~10s explorer crashes leaving only the background image. Explorer restarts after about ~5s and again crashes after ~10s. The process actually disappears in Task Manager. Safe Mode changes nothing.

Only Explorer crashes. Any programs I start through task manager's Run command persist along with anything I am able to start during it's 10 second up phase. The frustrating thing is all the control panel functions are part of explorer so they disappear when explorer goes.

Using a flash drive I was able to install Avast while it was in this cycle. (there had been no AV software on the machine) using a boot scan, it found and removed 5 viruses. This didn't help at all.

Basically my only idea is to use "Run" through Task Manager, Hit 'browse' and copy paste folders that need saving one at a time to a usb drive all through the browse window.

Any ideas to fix or at least stabilize so I can remove data and jump ship would help. (My next option is to buy something to adapt a laptop HDD connector to standard IDE or USB.)

1/19/2009 2:13:49 PM

repair with an XP cd or boot off another drive to retrieve files?



[Edited on January 19, 2009 at 4:38 PM. Reason : does knoppix recognize flash drives?]

1/19/2009 4:35:33 PM

reinstall windows but DO NOT REFORMAT or repartition during the install. install windows to a different directory. should be stable enough then to get your data off.

or you could boot an open-source OS off a cd, mount your hard drive, and get your data that way, but it's a little bit more involved.

1/19/2009 4:44:30 PM

Thanks, I'll try that philihp.

I've made several passes with updated Spybot having it run it's pre-desktop-loading scan and scanning with updated avast during boot up and just after spybot finishes before desktop loads. Each time it would find less and less and less until both scans were clean twice. (restarting between all scans)

after everything was clean i repaired the installation with a boot cd and never let it actually go into normal windows, only safe mode. When it went into safe mode, dozens of cmd windows came up and went away and the explorer crash loop resumed.

Hopefully installing in another location will remain stable for some time/

[Edited on January 21, 2009 at 4:49 PM. Reason : /]

1/21/2009 4:49:22 PM

Can you run 'eventvwr.msc' from task manager and see if there's any errors explaining why explorer is crashing. It might be a simple fix.

1/22/2009 10:58:49 AM

Win Repair

Safe mode, cleanup and reboot (including registry startup folder)

remove drive, put on another system, clean up... then repair on original system...

1/22/2009 2:47:03 PM