I do not know if it works or is an appropriate solution. SearingWolfe suggested the following for those that cannot find explorer.exe in the registry. Thanks to everyone for their help and happy new year! Hopefully this thread will save many people lots of time in the future. You can back up the explorer.exe folder (and files in the Image FileĮxecution Options root if applicable) by exporting them before the deletion Rebooted and everything was back to normal. In there I had an explorer.exe folder that I deleted (you may have anĮntry in the root of the Image File folder as well. go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Currentĥ. File, new task, typed regedit, clicked okĤ. ctrl+alt+del to get windows task managerģ. I read many posts related to the topic and eventually did the following:Ģ. In short, the proposed action plan that worked for him and seems to be Hi, I found the following at a Windows XP Newsgroup at