Missing-lost explorer 1

[mars19301]

All was well for months when suddenly things went terribly awry.....Win98, When I right click on Start, there is no Explore. When I try to double-click on a desktop folder to see its contents or when I click on explorer.exe, I get an error window entitled Explorer with the message that this program has performed an illegal operation and will shutdown (and it does).

Fortunately, I also use 2xExplore ( a great shareware)which does all and more so I can still get the job done, but what happened and how do I fix it.

I already reinstalled w98se to no avail. Any suggestions or foggiest notions will be greatly appreciated.

Jim

 

[gargouille]

Logically the 3rd party thingy has disabled the regular function...else it couldn't do it's magick.
Probably also made some registry changes...that may or may not be reversed if it's removed.
Take your pick...3rd party...native Windows.

 

[mars19301]

You're probably right,G. In another thread I found mention of vmm32.vxd corruption causing similar problems. In a search I found that I have 2 (1 is a backup)
vmm32.vxd 919k 12/11/02(when this mess started), 464k 4/23/99. Note the size differences. Perhaps I'll follow that thread's suggestion on replacing one with the other. I always fear that the damn thing won't boot after messing with this type of file.

Thanks for the input.

Jim

 

[gargouille]

The backup 1 is from something that installed and overwrote the short one (SWAG).
I wouldn't worry too much about not booting: IF the machine'll do it's post, you can always make it work, one way or the other. You'll obviously have to do the switch while Windoze isn't looking. (Might try using msconfig to keep it from loading the driver, but don't be surprised if the system thinks it needs it and can't let you do this.)

The fear faced head on tack calls for a plan of action if the switch kersplatzes things.

Got one?

 

[mars19301]

Well, as strange as this problem appeared, it has disappeared. I did run defrag and reboot twice and we're back to normal. In the IT biz, we call problems like this "job security". Thanks for your time.

Jim