after win98 boots up explorer illegal operation at weock32.dll appears. closing it crashes system. removing desktop shortcuts to ie fixes the illegal op message but the problem is still there.tried reinstalling windows,explorer ran CWS and adawre and spybot. no help. alot of viruses were removed but i have no idea how to get explorer working again. this all started happening after kids were using computer.
HELP!

try booting in safe mode, closing all un nececery processes, deleting every thing you dont recognise at start - programs - startup, win.ini, autoexec.bat, and in the system registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current-Version\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current-Version\Run
beside that you can look at the other software I reomend at http://geocities.com/motherofinvention

tried all that and no help. removed ie6 and outlook but still no help. Now I can't even get windows to reinstall completely. I guess the hackers dream has come true cause it looks like the only option left is to reformat and reinstall everything. everytime windows boots "this program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down. Fault at module weock32.dll..." appears. Closing the message leaves me with just the wallpaper and no icons or tray. The problem must be in the registry but I can't figure it out.

G'day,

Have you used msconfig to check your system.ini file?
Under system.ini/boot you should have the line: shell=Explorer.exe
If there is anything else on that line (ie a mshata.exe or the like) then that is your problem.
Post back,
Elric