Explorer won’t run at startup

I’ve received quite a few calls over the past few months about Explorer.exe not running at startup. There are several things that could cause this to happen, but what I have seen the most lately is that it is caused by an infection by the Win32/Oficla.E virus. For those of you that don’t know what I am referring to, here is the scenario… you turn your computer on for the day, you login like normal, after the login screen the hard drive will click for a while and then just stop with a blank screen (your wallpaper showing). You can move the mouse, etc., but no start menu or desktop icons. Here are few things that you can do:

First, in order to get to your Start Menu and your files, press Control-Alt-Delete. At the menu, click on Task Manager. From the Task Manager, you can click the file menu at the top and goto “Run”. Type in “explorer” or “explorer.exe” and hit ok. This should start explorer and cause the Start Menu to appear.

From here, it’s important to remove any viruses that are on the system. If you have an anti-virus installed, go ahead and run it… however, one thought on this, if your resident virus scanner didn’t catch it in the first place (and prevent infection) – it probably won’t find it now!

I recommend installing Avast anti-virus. I’ve had nothing but good luck with it, it removes just about anything you can throw at it, and it has options that others do not. The most important option that Avast has over other anti-virus programs is the Boot-time scan option. Viruses are hard to remove because once they load into memory, if you delete the file, the process running in memory will just re-write itself to the hard drive. That is where the boot time scan option comes into play, Avast can scan your system at boot up — before Windows even fully loads — and remove those files, and this is because the virus hasn’t loaded into memory at this point in the boot up process. I saved the best for last with Avast, if you are a home user, it is totally free!

So, download Avast from www.avast.com and run the installer. During the installation process, it will ask if you want to “Schedule a boot time scan”.. tell it yes! It will prompt you to reboot, click yes to reboot. During the boot up process, it will scan the system for viruses (you’ll have to prompt delete or move to chest if it finds something).

After removing the viruses, you may still have problems with explorer.exe not starting up. But don’t worry, we have the fix for that also… it has to do with a registry entry left over from the virus:

1. You’ll first need to do the trick we listed above to start explorer.exe (control-alt-delete, task manager, then run “explorer.exe”).
2. Click on Start, then Run, then type in regedit and hit ok. If you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7, you’ll goto the Start menu, then just type in regedit and hit enter.
3. Inside of the Registry Editor, on the left hand column, navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Winlogon

   Now for those of you who are not very familiar with the Windows Registry, you’ll click the plus beside the keys on the left hand side to expand each one. Start with HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then under it click the plus beside Software, then Microsoft, and so on…

4. On the right hand side, look for Shell. Double click it to edit it.
5. Make sure that the Shell value ONLY has “explorer.exe” in it and nothing else. Viruses will append other executables onto this key in order to run processes at startup. If you have anything else listed here, erase it, it should only say “explorer.exe”.
6. After you edit the key, click Ok to save it. Close the Registry Editor, and reboot!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 and is filed under the category General. You can follow any responses to this post through the post's RSS 2.0 feed.If you reference this blog post in your own blog, you can log a "ping" using this trackback link.