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

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-ive-screwed-up-my-work-computer-dont-tell-the-it-guys/135451>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 5, 2002, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-ive-screwed-up-my-work-computer-dont-tell-the-it-guys/135451 "2002-11-05T22:48:32Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Amp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Amp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amp)\
**Post date:** [November 5, 2002, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-ive-screwed-up-my-work-computer-dont-tell-the-it-guys/135451/1 "2002-11-05T22:48:32Z")

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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!!!**

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**Author:** ![Number](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/number/32/242_2.png) [@Number](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Number)\
**Post date:** [November 5, 2002, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-ive-screwed-up-my-work-computer-dont-tell-the-it-guys/135451/2 "2002-11-05T23:20:56Z")

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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…_  
😉