Help! I've Screwed Up My Work Computer. Don't Tell The IT Guys.

OK, I was bored at work today and had nothing better to do so I decided to play around with my new Win2K machine and tweak it to my liking. After doing a lot of basic and intermediate tweaks to it I decided to do something a little bit more advanced. I decided to change the start button to read something else.

I started out by openeing explorer.exe with notepad, finding the appropriate string and changing it to what I wanted it to. Then I saved the file as explorer1.exe in the same directory as explorer.exe.

The second step was to change the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]. I renamed the Shell value from explorer.exe to explorer1.exe.

I then rebooted the computer. It booted up fine and got to the logon screen OK but after I logged on all I got was a blue screen. I could move the mouse cursor but and shut down through CTRL+ALT+DEL but that was it.

Could I possibly boot up to a DOS prompt, find explorer1.exe, delete it, rename explorer.exe to explorer1.exe and fix it that way? If not could someone please help me find a solution? I’m going into work early tomorrow to fix this so please HELP!!!

Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL at the plain blue screen, click Task Manager, Applications tab, New Task, type in regedit, hit OK and change the shell value back to explorer.exe.

Then repeat after me, The registry is not a toy…
:wink: