Please help me, I have no ideas what to do now! I can only try to reach help using other's computers.

Whenever I turn on the computer and load Windows (95 OSR2), it goes fine until everything is finished, then Explorer.exe will make an Access Violation immediately. The error messages reported by Norton CrashGuard 3.0 is like this: "Explorer.exe causes fault *C0000005 in [unknown] at address 016f:00000038". They whole system then crashes when I attempt to end task (however I can shut down the computer properly)

Attempts to load Windows safe mode did not make any difference, the same Access Violation occurs, although this time it can be ignored. Most functions of explorer does not work, including control panel, dialup networking, my computer and rightclick menus. It freezes everytime I attempt to run. A few functions of explorer works, such as the Run menu, and I can access folders using that, but not anything to do with copy/paste/properties that sort of thing.

DOS runs alright, the hard disk is fine, the only problem being unable to load windows because Explorer.exe crashes the first second I do anything. The screensaver would even turn on if I leave the computer! But just a touch of a mouse and I'm dead.

I cannot think of the possible reason of this, apart from that the last time I used the computer I installed a dialer fro an ISP. It created backup of 6 files in c:\windows\system folder and then replaced it. These files are:

asycfilt.dll
olepro32.dll
stdole2.tlb
msvbvm60.dll
mscomctl.ocx

I have tried to restore these files from the backup but it did not affect the situation.

I would be really grateful if any of you can help me! Please, I don't know what happened and I don't want to have to reinstall Windows. But it seems the only option if Explorer.exe is going to crash. Could it be something in the registry that I can't avoid loading everytime I start windows?

Please help. Thank you so much.

Joanan Lee
longlong@cybergal.com

Did you reinstall Win95 and see? Nothing will happen if you reinstall. Explorer seems to be corrupted.

Try to get another copy of explorer.exe from another comp using the same OS and jam it in over top the old one you have (which is corrupt) and that might fix it. Worth the try before reinstalling the entire OS again.

If that works, then reboot your system 2 times in a row to ensure your registry is copasetic.

Pierre

Good Suggestions About the restoration of the possibly corrupt file and the re-install of win 95. But I also want to ask if you could possibly uninstall that dialer from that ISP(Name not mentioned). That seems to bee the root of the problems "if" there were none before you installed it....

It is posible that the dailer is infected with a virus and if you are using Norton VirusScan, it might be detecting the virus but not able to report/clean it. So disable your virus scanner if you have one then get into windows see if that is it or not!

First I would get rid of that Norton CrashGuard. Then I would format and Reinstall windows. Something has been corrupted and if you just reinstall over it, the problem will still exist. You need to wipe and start from scratch without the norton.

I'm having a problem with my computer similar to this, but on a Windows 98 machine. I tried installing drivers for my video card and when I restarted my computer the registration for the video card took over my computer RIGHT before windows completely loaded. It dialed it's 1-800 number and then just sat there "sending user information" for about 5 minutes. I thought to myself, "It was only a few lines of text it had to send, why is it taking so long?" So I hit ctrl+alt+del and ended the task. Windows still didn't start up so I just turned my computer off. When it restarted windows asked for my "password", yes, the one that doesn't do anything... and when I entered it like normal a second later I got a message "Explorer.exe has performed an illegal operation", so I hit close, and the computer just sits there. The mouse can still move around the screen, my desktop picture is loaded, but nothing will work. I've tried scandisk to see if anything is wrong and it didn't find anything wrong.
Reinstalling windows is NOT an option since I have about 10 GIGs of my music on this computer. This computer is the computer I use in my recording studio. I didn't back up all 10 GIGs of music because I didn't think that installing video card drivers would cause this problem.
Please, if anyone has a solution to my problem e-mail directly, and post the solution here so future victims can solve their problem too.
I've searched the Microsoft Knowledge base and I've concluded that it's the worst one I've EVER seen. I can't find ANYTHING on this problem there. And I know if I give in and get tech support from Microsoft all they'll tell me to do is reinstall windows.