Please follow this thread, I need to find out why after nav deleted the trojan, (didn't write down what it was) when I boot up windows, everything will come up fine, but there won't be any running tasks now. http://www.computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/144162.html Thanks! Mac

How can you run windows fine WITHOUT any running tasks, like SYS TRAY and EXPLORER? You may have bigger probs, but the .exe association is bad, but the virus may have done more. Can run SFC, even in SAFE MODE?

I read your previous thread. My little theory: I guess Norton found the virus in the running process of spool32 (or there was a name confusion by the virus' design - Windows is fairly easy to confuse in services that handle networking). Norton could not delete the process because it was wrte-protected. So Norton isolated the executable (not at the time of detection/correction, but on the previous bootup), effectively hiding it from Windows. Now Windows boots and is not allowed to process the executable that it sees. So it runs through its "cannot find" loops and it gives up (not really, it just follows to the next logical loop, which leaves you with the desktop). When you want to run something you essentially send a command through the same code, which reads the same memory references that are still unresolved about spool32. This time, it does nothing because it has no design for dealing without a standard, unresolved system need, except by reporting its problem and leaving you on the desktop. Heh, but that could all be totally wrong. I did not write Norton or Windows. Regardless... Replace that spool32.exe file using the instructions here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q129/6/05.asp&NoWebContent=1 Extract the files in the CAB files shown here: (spool32 is in there, in Win98_46.cab) http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/q238/7/67.asp&NoWebContent=1 If this does not work, get all the data you want of that computer and reinstall Windows.