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 opening 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!!!
Your solution would probably work, as long as the hard drive is FAT32 and not NTFS.
And in case you were wondering what your problem is… You can’t do that in Notepad. A whole bunch of hex values that don’t equate to a “normal” character, when opened in Notepad, are shown as spaces. These spaces are then saved in place of the original values when you save the file again. You’d need a hex editor to do this properly.
You can try hitting CTRL ALT DEL, then choose “Run” from the Menu, then in the run box type “explorer”. This will run the normal windows desktop/explorer. Alternatively, you can run regedit from the run box to open the registry. After you change the key back to explorer.exe, just reboot.
Open Task Manager, either by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc, or pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and clicking Task Manager. Then you can start explorer with the “New Task (Run…)” command on the File menu.
Oh, hell, just do what most users do. Call the IT guys, tell them your computer doesn’t work, and swear up and down that you didn’t do anything to it. Tell them you weren’t even in the office that day. Tell them you’ve never even touched the machine. Blame it on the cleaning crew. Accuse the IT guys of intentionally providing you with a faulty machine, just to hurt your career. Threaten to call their boss.
And you’d need to make sure that what you changed the ‘Start’ to was exactly the same length. And pray that nothing else in Windows refered to the button by its title string.
IT guys love users like this. Then you wonder why we lock down everything on their computers?
NEVER lie to us. We don’t care what stupid stuff you’ve done, because we already know you WILL do stupid things. Just tell us what you did so we can fix and forget about it.
That doesn’t mean we won’t despise you for your boneheaded mistakes, though.
Since the original problem seems to have been fixed, perhaps a slight hijack can be allowed. I have wondered for some time about some of the advice I have seen on this board about not shutting down Explorer. From this thread I surmise that Explorer is the program that runs the desktop, etc. Apparently that is different from both Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer. Anyway, since installing a new version of Outlook Express and Internet Explorer several weeks ago, my computer locks up a lot. Sometimes it can be freed up by CTRL-ALT-DELETE, and canceling the task that is not responding. Frequently, it says that Explorer is not responding. Because of what I have seen on this board, I expected that if I shut down Explorer, the whole system will die, but that doesn’t seem to happen. In fact, when I cancel Explorer, the system seems to run better, at least for a while. The desktop goes away, but then it gets redrawn, although some of the programs that were open may have disappeared. Can anyone explain this behavior? When Explorer gets canceled, does it just restart?
Killing explorer is kind of (IMO) a step below (or above) a reboot. Depending on your OS and the circumstances, it may or may not restart on it’s own. You can always do the CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to bring up task manager and run explorer (at least on NT and 2K, I can’t remember or vouch for other OS’s with any amount of certainty). Whenever my computer is misbehaving, sometimes killing explorer can save me a reboot. The only side affect is that some of my system tray icons don’t come back.
Just to make this thread a little more interesting.
Can you upgrade I.E. (internet explorer) from the one on your windows install disk, and then in the future, re-install widows (98) over the top?
I tried this once and had to re-format to do a fresh install. Some IT guy said once you upgrade I.E. you cant just re-install windows over the top, but I tried anyway and it didnt work.
My upgraded version of I.E. was broken and it couldnt be fixed so I thought "re-install windows". Wrong!!!! Six hours later I had my computer up and running again. Thank-God I had a second hard-drive on the thing! Was there another way around this, for future ref.? Can I.E. itself be replaced (I couldnt repair it)?
What the Hell?
What are these "hamsters " I keep hearing about?
I think I may have stepped on one this morning.
Sorry, if it slowed things up.
Maybe we could all pitch in and upgrade this server or something.
I`ve got about $2.40 on me.
First off, the hamsters are basically an attempt to anthromorphize the server into something a bit more fun. A legend of the SDMB is that it is powered by woefully fatigued hamsters, hence the occasional lethargy. It’s more fun to say that a hamster ate your Op, or that they’re all asleep today then to just complain about the server acting up.
And the issue with pitching in is that the SDMB is owned by a for-profit corperation, so there may be ownership issues involved. Also, there is always the issue of legal and financial trouble involved in banning a big donar.
I think at this point, if you wanted to donate money, the best thing you could do is buy advertising on the front page.
