Ok, I’m pretty stupid and I’ve tried editing the explorer.exe file numerous times thanks to you guys giving me evil ideas here at straightdope. I was smart enough to make a copy on a disk just in case though. Well, I’ve tried changing the Start button twice, and I’ve corrupted explorer.exe twice. I can never fix the problem until I manage to get into dos somehow and just copy over the disk’s explorer.exe to C:\windows. This time I was able to get into dos b/c it asked me if I wanted normal mode, safe mode, or command prompt only etc. So I choose comand prompt and it kicked me into dos. (thank god) So I guess my question is how can I get into dos instead of windows when I boot. I’ve held shift and went into setup, but I can’t find a way to get to dos there. Keep in mind that when I mess this up, I can’t get into windows at all, so “restart in MS-DOS mode” is out of the question. Thanks!
Press F8 immediately upon seeing “Starting Windows 9X”…
Select the option “Command-Prompt Only” from the Startup Menu.
On some computers (like mine), it is Ctrl instead of F8, and it must be held down before you see any indication of W98 (yet after the BIOS’ hardware check. Difficult).
You can cause the start menu to always be shown by adding/editing the following lines (at the end) of MSDOS.sys:
BootMenu=x
BootMenuDelay=y
Where x=0 for no boot menu, x=1 for show boot menu,
and y=the time (in seconds) before the system starts normally.
Any tips on how I can mess with explorer.exe and not mess everything up? I normally restart in MS-DOS and use the command edit to open it up in a text file. But, I also have hex-editor that I tried using. Is their a way I can like pre-complie to check for errors or something? Thanks for all the help so far.
I believe that what you are trying to do violates your EULA and may be illegal.
But…
A, uummmm, ‘friend’ tells me,
"A text editor won’t do it. You need to use a Hex editor. Remember that hex “00” is not the same as " “(ASCII space).”