Explorer Shell not loading

Well, as it turns out with the Compaq I was working on that would not start the Explorer shell leaving a blank desktop that was rather useless, it was the hard drive itself. I was thinking the VeryLince virus may have had something to do with it, but even after the repair install I was still having issues.

Finally, after trying many many things I broke down, backed up the documents and other things, and then did a full reinstall. Because it was NTFS before, and I was impatient, I opted for a quick format. The install went fine, and luckily XP knew already what all the hardware in the machine was. No driver hunting for me (yay!).

Alas, not all was well though. After it was running and I had activated Windows, I started to update it. After a couple bouts of Windows Update, Internet Explorer started to crash. At first it would only crash while loading the Windows Update ActiveX component, and then got progressively worse. I tinkered more, and decided a fresh restart again was in order.

This time around I went with the full NTFS format. I ran into issues with this. The entire format would not complete (and, of course, it only gives the error after a LONG time formatting). I then scanned the hard drive with a utility CD of mine and came up with many an error.

I replaced the hard drive, reinstalled Windows again, and all is well now. All updates went fine, and the DVD I burnt copied all data back over in a jiffy.

 

So, if the Explorer shell doesn’t start up and leaves you with a blank desktop, the hard disk itself may be to blame.

Windows File Protection could not initiate a scan of protected system files. 0x000006ba

While trying to repair a computer that was having some issues with the explorer shell not loading (explorer.exe) I attempted to run sfc /scannow to scan the Protected Windows Files to see if that’d get the shell to load. However, when attempting to run it, I ran into the following error:

Windows File Protection could not initiate a scan of protected system files.
Error code 0x000006ba [RPC server unavailable]

This was a bit annoying, because I have to use the task manager to do anything with this system. Since explorer.exe is not starting, the run command from the task manager is the only way to get anything to run. So, I’d run the sfc command, and it’d just flash for a second and disappear. After using the command prompt to run it (which was also broken, I had to copy autoexec.nt, command.com, and config.nt from the Windows CD to make it work) it gave me the above error.

I tried the fixes that Microsoft suggests where you export the Verisign certificate from a good computer and import it on the hosed one, which did not work. Later I tried running services.msc and I noticed that the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Locator services were both stopped and set to manual. I changed their status to automatic, rebooted the machine into regular mode, and am currently running the System File Checker.

With any luck I’ll be able to get the explorer.exe shell to function again after this. The repair install of Windows didn’t work and doing a format and reinstall is like losing…