Exlorer.exe crashes when you log in

[daveydoom]

Working on a PC for a friend, not sure if it's Win98 or Win98 SE. Surely there's a way to determine this but none of the Boot CD's I've tried so far have been able to give me this information unless I'm just looking in the wrong place . I've tried using a Bart PE CD as well as a UBCD4Win CD.

As soon as Windows loads and you enter the password (or hit Cancel ) Windows pops up an Explorer error saying "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Details shows that EXPLORER caused an invalid page fault in module EXPLORER.EXE and 017f:00401f31.

I was wondering if there was a way to apply the Unoffical Service Pack (or similar) from a bootable CD in order to correct this problem? I'm out of options since Safe Mode does the same thing. I really don't want to have to reinstall if I don't have to and I was hoping that applying the service pack would replace any damaged files with good ones.

Am I grasping at straws here?

Thoughts?

Edited November 4, 2007 by daveydoom

[Tihiy]

I see a way...

Replace shell=explorer.exe in [boot] section in \windows\system.ini with shell=command.com for example.

Copy SP2 exe file somewhere, for example into C:\

Then boot into Win98 and in command prompt which appears you can start SP2 exe.

If you're really advanced, you can extract files from SP2 exe and SP2.cab inside and replace them on system one by one...

[daveydoom]

I'll give it a whirl and report back.

Thanks for the idea .

[daveydoom]

Editing the ini file worked fine and I was able to install the service pack but I still get the same error when Windows loads .

Not sure if it's really worth replacing files from the cab one by one when a clean install would be faster . I can slave his drive and copy all of his data files so he doesn't lose anything.

Hey, it was worth a shot though. If anyone has any other ideas I'm all ears.

Thanks, Dave

[Ambassador]

For the meantime, you could use an alternative shell, like Liteshell or LiteStep, and at least the computer will be usuable.

Heck, you could even use Program Manager, though I wouldn't recommend it because it sucks as a user interface.

One possible way to temp-fix this is to install 98lite and use the shell switcher to switch to the 95 shell. You will need a 95 CD or the 95 shell files however.

Formatting is probably the best way to fix it.

[daveydoom]

Nice options thanks B) . Without knowing what else may be wrong with that PC even if I do get it going with LiteShell or Litestep I may as well format it and start fresh.

I'll be honest and say that I've never heard of those shell replacments. It's just something I've never even thought of before. I've bookmarked sites for both of them and will make it a point to play around with them on my test machine .

Thanks everyone.

[Steven W]

I have ran across this problem so many times in 9x and ME. My advice here works about 95% of the time. Find out what version of IE you are running. Download a full setup for that version or IE 6 sp1. (you may have to burn it to a CD using another computer). Change the system.ini file to shell=progman.exe. Navigate to the IE setup and run. Reboot. Modify system.ini back to shell=explorer.exe, reboot again. When you boot you may be asked to reboot one more time. All is usually fixed. You may need to reinstall updates to whatever version of IE that you chose.

NOTE: progman.exe, not program.exe (I have seen too many people get that confused)

Edited November 5, 2007 by Steven W