Ok Long story short I hacked my Explorer.exe and replaced it for skinning purposes. What's the easiest way to restore it to the original explorer.exe. Thanks in advance for da help!!!

Never tried it, but you could probably do it by hacking it again--use Resource Hacker to open Explorer.exe and compile a script to change something small like a string variable. Use Task Manager to kill the running version of Explorer; save the modified Explorer.exe over the existing one. When Windows pitches a fit about changed system files, let it restore Explorer.exe from the XP CD. Hmm . . . that might actually work.

http://www.windows-help.net/windowsxp/howto-03.html try here; hope this helps.

Hmm . . . nitti's advice sounds MUCH better.

Can you somehow delete explorer.exe from outside of Windows, then boot to CD and do a repair install? I imagine the CD will recognize that something like explorer.exe is missing. lol -=Bryan=-

I used ResHack to modify explorer.exe, but I backed it up. Also, I named my hacked version EXPLR.exe and set it as my "shell" Run regedit and change the shell entry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon I believe Windows XP keeps a backup of explorer.exe in it hidden system "dllcache" folder. When I tried hacking explorer.exe before, Windows just overwrote it with the original. Hence, I had resort to changing the registry shell entry to use my skinned explorer. This info might help you in the future :-)

Okay, maybe I'm wrong about explorer.exe being backed up in C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache If you let ResHack create explorer_org.exe (or whatever the backup is called), then you can mostly follow tropic's advice above. (Kill explorer in the task manager, then rename explorer_org.exe to explorer.exe)