(PC, Windows 7 32 bit) I’ve been trying to open up some hard drive space by moving files (documents, photos, music) to an external drive. Now, all of a sudden I get the title message if I try to open the recycle bin or any other function like “Computer”. What the hell have I done and how can I fix it?
That should be Explorer.exe: etc.
here’s a thread that might help - http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/10524-explorer-exe-server-execution-failed.html
Are you logged in as administrator? The message sounds like a hardware problem but that doesn’t seem to the case from the last couple of posts I read.
Sigh. Looking at the linked thread, but can’t figure out what they’re telling me to do. I go to regedit and follow the path shown, but. . .then what? I can go to the admin account, but if I try to delete the user account, it tells me it will erase all my emails. 
Can you right click on the drive/directory and go into properties? (you probably need to be in the admin acct - definitely will for the rest)
If so, go to the securities tab.
Click on Advanced and another window will open.
Click on the Owner tab.
If it doesn’t have your admin acct user id there in the top box, you can take ownership as follows. It shouldn’t screw anything up, but make a note of the current owner just in case.
Click on the Edit button, then ‘other users or groups’ button. Yet another window opens.
Click on Advanced to get . . . guess what . . . another window.
To the right, click on the ‘find now’ button.
In the list it produces, find the name of your admin acct. Click on that.
Now click on OK until you get back to the Owner tab. Check the box that says ‘replace owner on subcontainer and objects’.
Click ok a few more times until you’re back out.
For an entire drive, this can take several or more minutes. Just be patient. It should give you a running list of the items being processed.
As for the registry changes, for personal, I have
the entry type is REG_EXPAND_SZ, in case you need to create the entry.
first do a restore point.
Also, you should back upt that section of the registry. Just point to the shell folder and then in the menu bar, click on file → export and save someplace like your desktop.
I haven’t read the whole thread and I can’t vouch for any advice they give but if you have questions, it would help me if you can point to a specific set of posts. 
With nothing more to go on than a vague error message (not your fault – Windows error messages are notoriously vague), I can only make a vague guess as to the underlying problem. But this Microsoft Answer post seems to confirm my suspicion.
A little bit of backstory (skip this if you don’t really care about what’s going on and just want it fixed)
Windows implements a lot of features using a client/server model, even internally within the same computer. In particular, COM/COM+/DCOM has been Microsoft’s main development model for Windows until .NET came along. But even now, .NET uses COM wrappers to provide an interface for “conventional” clients.
Okay, so an example would make this a lot more clear. Suppose you install Autodesk’s AutoCAD (a Computer Aided Drafting package used in engineering, architecture, etc.). When you run explorer and highlight an AutoCAD drawing (.dwg) file, you might get a little thumbnail view of the drawing in the status bar at the bottom (in Win 7, anyway). And it might tell you some AutoCAD-specific information there, too, like who was the last person to modify the drawing, or what project the drawing belongs to.
But how does that information get there? All of that data is proprietary to AutoCAD, so Explorer can’t do it by itself. What happens is that when you install AutoCAD, it registers a COM/.NET “server” – basically just a program library that contains some functions for drawing a thumbnail of a .dwg file, fetching drawing properties, etc. It also registers a file property handler (I can’t remember the exact terminology for this in Windows) with Explorer and links it to the .dwg file extension. Whenever Explorer encounters this file type, it runs through the list of all the handlers hooked to that file type, tries to load the appropriate “server” (a .dll, typically), and passes the requested functions of to the server.
This is your problem…
All of this business of “registering” a server or a file property handler really just means adding some particular entries in the Windows registry (hence its name). Servers are identified by a pseudo-random hex string called a “globally unique identifier” (GUID). These are all the entries you see under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID and HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Classes/CLSID in the registry. A typical Windows computer will have hundreds or thousands of registered classes.
What’s likely happening is that Explorer is trying to invoke a registered server, which might a 3rd-party shell add-on like my AutoCAD example above or some Microsoft-internal feature, but somewhere along the chain registry entries that tie this whole system together, “something” has run amok. Unfortunately, “something” could be virtually anything. My guess is that some COM server class that should be registered isn’t. This could be fixed by running “regsvr32.exe <missing DLL>”, but you would first need to figure out which server was damaged. This is very difficult to do without a good understanding of Windows internals and an API spying tool like procmon from Sysinternals.
So, what now?
Several possibilities spring to mind. Rolling back to a previous system restore point is probably the best and easiest solution, if it works. If the error itself interferes with your ability to run the system restore utility, you might be able to work around it by booting to safe mode.
Failing that, there’s a decent chance that the busted registry entries are user-specific. The Windows registry is split into several sections called “hives”, one of which stores user-specific settings and is backed by the (hidden, system) file "%userprofile%
tuser.dat. You can tell if that’s the case (and get around it) just by logging in as a different user. If you can’t get the system restore utility to run from your own account, even from safe mode, but everything works fine from a different user account, then you can use that one to the system restore.
However, odds are that your computer only has one user account with interactive login privileges. Moreover, to run system restore, the account will need admin privileges. You’ll either need to create a new user account and grant it admin privileges or (probably simpler) just enable the built-in “administrator” account, which is disabled by default.
I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, since that’s a common issue that a lot of people have already written instructions for. Just google something like “enable administrator account windows 7” and/or “create new user windows 7” and I’m sure you’ll find several step-by-step instructions for that.
If the problem is only affecting your account, and you finally get system restore to run but it doesn’t solve the problem, then likely your only option is to backup your documents, destroy your user profile, and create a new one. You’ll lose your application settings, browser history, etc., but it’s really your only option at that point if you don’t have guru skills 
I appreciate all the information. The problem started when I transferred a bunch of stuff to an external hard drive and deleted them from the internal drive: things such as the “documents” folder, “music”, “photos”, etc., along with a few heavy hitter programs like iTunes (with its attendant music files) and PhotoShop. Somewhere in this process, things got screwed up. For some reason, the documents folder and other folders were duplicated in the Users folder, so I deleted them also. After the last transfer, which I believe was the Documents files in the Users folder, I went to check disk space and received the error message. I then tried the recycle bin with the same result. Ditto for Control Panel.
I do have an administrator account, and can access everything from there. So you’re saying that if I do a system restore from the Admin account, that it should take care of the problem?
The problem with destroying the current user account is that ALL emails will be lost (using Outlook, much to my annoyance), which I can’t afford to do at this point because of things my wife is involved in. Short of printing them all out (which ain’t gonna happen), I don’t see a way around this.
dzero: If you look at post #5 on your link, you’ll see the regedit post I was referring to. I haven’t gotten much past that other than to see that it worked for some folks. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out from the post what it is he’s saying to do.
You can copy the Outlook .pst file (the database file where the email is stored) to any user account, then take ownership of it with that account.
OK, that’s the one I referred to in the second part of my last post. I don’t know where this comes from or why it would work though.
If you want to try it, first do a restore point and back up (export) that section of the registry (or the entire thing - takes a few minutes).
Then right click on ‘user shell folders’ → new → expandable string variable.
Put in ‘personal’ for the name (first entry) then put in what I quoted above for the second one.
As far as I can tell, the 2 entries in post 5 are the same except for an extra space between ‘shell’ and ‘folders’ in the second one.
good luck!
It’s hard to say for sure what happened. Maybe one of the special “shell folders” in the Users<username>\ folder (or their content) got messed up somehow by whatever process wound up giving you duplicates. But what exactly do you mean when you say you transferred Photoshop and iTunes to the external drive? Just your data files (i.e. PSDs and music), or the apps themselves? Offhand, I know Photoshop installs a number of shell hooks, and I wouldn’t be surprised if iTunes does as well. Moving an application to another location manually rather than uninstalling it and reinstalling it will (in most cases) leave you with a bunch of busted path references in the registry, which could definitely cause something like this to happen. If you were just taking about your data, then never mind.
That’s my hope. I don’t know offhand precisely what it does and doesn’t make snapshots of, but one would hope that it includes critical stuff like each user’s ntuser.dat file. It’s certainly worth trying first before getting into anything more complicated.
If the user has mail in a .PST file, it should be located somewhere in their user profile dir. If I’m not mistaken, the default location on Win 7/Vista is:
%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\
Typically that resolves to:
C:\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\
In any case, you don’t really have to “nuke” the profile data, per se. A safer approach is to do this:
[ol][li]Log in with some other admin account[/li][li]Rename the broken user’s profile directory. Ex., if it’s C:\Users\Bob, just rename it to C:\Users\Bob.hosed, or what have you.[/li][li]Create a new, empty folder called C:\Users\Bob[/li][li]Right-click on My Computer, and choose Properties. Click “Advanced System Settings” on the left pane. On the “Advanced” tab of the dialog that opens, there is a section labeled “User Profiles” with a Settings button. Click that. Now just select the <your computer name>\Bob account. The size should be 0, since you’ve already moved the files somewhere else. Delete the profile.[/li][/ol]
At this point, the next time you log in as Bob, Windows will know that you have no profile and will create a new one for you by copying the default profile. You can then pull whatever files you need back into the fresh profile from your Bob.hosed copy. If Bob.hosed was created by renaming the original (instead of copying), Bob should even already have file permissions to access it.
Looks like I have to make some decisions here. I really don’t like the idea of mucking around in critical areas, so I suppose I could go to Geek Squad or some such to unfuck this mess. I’m not afraid to attempt some of this, so may give it a go when I have some time.
Yes, I did move iTunes over, but when I fired it up it acted like it was a new program and I had to tell it to go looking for my music files. Luckily it found them. For PSE, I uninstalled and reinstalled it on the external, so no worries there.
I’ll puzz over all this and see what I can try without endangering anything. If I’m successful, I’ll get back to you all. If not, well. . .pay no attention to that mushroom cloud in the PNW.
Ah, fuck me to tears. I did a system restore and it deleted my administrator account. Now I have zero options to access the control panel or anything else. Fuck.
Hey, what if I tried to do a reinstall of the Windows 7 upgrade?
Stop the presses! Problem solved! I was sitting here about to shoot myself, when a random thought crossed my mind: I never checked to see if my Family Treemaker program was still functional. So I opened it, and 15 years of information was. . .gone. Well, I transferred the entire My Documents file to the external drive, so I’ll see if it’s there. When I clicked “open”, a version of the “my computer” screen came up (which I couldn’t access from the Windows menu without the error message popping up). So I did a drag and drop of the entire My Docs folder into the C drive Users folder. VOILA! All functionality has magically returned. Thank fucking Og. Apparently something resides in Documents that is critical to this thing operating properly.
And thanks to all who tried to help. I had a feeling that this might be the problem, but had no way of trying it with everything disabled. Then I got distracted by trying to figure out a fix, when I could have just done the transfer via the administrator log-in. :smack: Jeebus, what a relief.