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.