thethinker_001

I have an old (6+ years) Dell desktop with Win 2000 Pro. I think it was fully updated to about a 2 years ago, so I'm guessing SP4 is installed. It's just been too long to remember and I can't find out because of the "Problem".
Haven't a clue where the install disks are or even if I had any - you know Dell.

This computer is a stand-alone and used by my wife in our business. I've tended to ignore it for a while now, as all she uses it for is to check her emails and read the news. It is protected by Norton AV (currently out of date), Spyware Doctor (same), and Spybot. I have it set up with rather draconian settings in IE6 and OE. The office discipline is to never open any email attachemnets if there is any suspicion of their origin, and never to go "wilding" when surfing the net. This computer has never had an infection by either virus or spyware.

She came to me and told me that the Spybot Teatimer popped up with a notice that the registry was going to change - she doesn't remember why.
I told her to dis-allow and that I would check it out later. She said that it didn't seem to properly boot-up so I told her to reboot. She did and it still didn't fully launch everything in the system tray. I then looked at it and the Teatimer alert came up for me while I was investigating. I also dis-allowed, but forgot to note what was being changed. I checked the task manager but didn't see anything untoward. I ran a scan w/NAV but it found nothing. I had left the room to do something else while the scan was in progress and my wife went back to her office, reported the results of the scan, and then told me there was a warning screen about explorer.exe.

I came back to check it out. The screen was white with a notice that the desktop was "off" and needed to be restarted. I pressed the button, the screen relaunched, but everything except the speaker icon was missing from the system tray. The quick launch tray was normal. But everytime I tried to do anything, the "Explorer.exe has encountered... etc." warning screen popped up and the desktop would go back to the white screen. I can get the task manager & the run screens up but I can't do anything. I tried to launch sfc, end processes, launch the CP, you name it - I keep getting the "explorer.exe" bit. I tried booting in safe mode - same result. Diagnostic mode - same.

Bottom line, I can't launch anything, get into anything, nothing. Any suggestions or is this FUBAR?

CTSNKY

Probably not unrecoverable....

Run the System File Checker:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222471

bdesmondMVP

Get autoruns from sysinternals (www.sysinternals.com, free) and get it on the box somehow. You can run it via the run menu option in task manager.

Uncheck all the stuff that isn't from Microsoft under the Explorer tab, scroll down to shell extensions.

Reboot and see if that helps.

djaburg

Sounds like you're running active desktop with a picture or something like that, which could be causing the error. I'd boot in to safe mode and try setting your desktop back to just a background color and see what happens. I've seen more than one rogue software cause the active desktop to cause things to get messy. Perhaps you could also try booting to safe mode and run a check using spybot to see if it finds anything. I also think that spybot keeps a log of all the tea timer alerts, so you might want to check that also.