Explorer.exe not working?

Question

Please Help,

I don't know very much about computers.

What's happened so far...

I had viruses on my computer that my usual antivirus hadn't detected (Trend Micro Internet Sucurity)

So I ran a scan using Malwarebyte's Anti Malware and It found viruses (trojan.vundo)

Now after removing viruses, I restarted etc but all of my desktop icons, start menu and task bar was gone.

I can access and create new tasks etc but simply typing: explorer.exe as a new task will cause everything to come back for about a couple of seconds and then disappear again, it's not showing up in my processes, only does for a split second.

I tried to do a system restore but I only have 1 restore point which is after all of this started happening so it's useless.

I don't know where to go ... I even tried

scanning with Uniblue Registery Booster 2 and it found and fixed about 300+ problems after scanning and rebooting it looked as though the desktop and taskbar etc was back but...nope just kept flicking off then on.

do I need to do anything in Safe Mode? I don't know how to access safe mode as i read you press F8 on startup...tried this but all i get is a load of noisy beeping and it starts in normal mode.

Will I need to reinstall Windows XP if so how do I do that from Task Manager and without discs ... I bought Laptop with XP already installed but i do have folder i386 and found that this folder is the installation.

Please help as this is really making me feel absalutely sick not knowing what to do.

Answer 1

My computer was infected with Trojan.Vundo (also known as VirtuMonde) recently. it was a real headache to remove. It must have taken me 3 weeks. Well, any free antivirus won't get rid of vundo, believe  me, I've tried them all. And there is a lot of software downloadable online that says it can get rid of a vundo infection, but it is just a scam. there are varying versions of the vundo virus, yours seems to also disable explorer.exe process. this would most likely be to make it harder to remove it because explorer.exe is basically your gui (graphical user interface). I tried all the free stuff i could find, none of it worked. i also tried Spyware Doctor, didn't work either. Norton couldn't get rid of it either. Both Norton and Spyware doctor DID detect it and said they removed it, but they DID NOT successfully remove the infection. SpyHunter helped me for a while. I eventually got rid of it using Trojan Remover and Bitdefender. Trojan Remover you can get as a free trial for like a month, Bitdefender you have to pay for in order to actually remove infections. vundo has an annoying habit of coming back over and over again. It can be memory resident (this means that its not just on your hard drive but also exhists in your RAM), making it very hard to get rid of and it can infect your computer processes. if you fail to remove the whole infection at once, the leftover files will recreate it. The main dll file (the one that is the actual virus) changes its name after every reboot and is very hard to remove in itself.

my advise would be to purchase a subscription for bitdefender and use trojan remover to effectively remove it, i dont know what other software would work. there are more non-free antivirus programs that might work. If you for somereason cant purchase the software you could always download it through torrent sites. be warned, this is ILLEGAL. so if you are uncomfortable doing this then don't.

I would not use any reinstall files from your computer to format and reinstall windows again because there is a very good chance they are infected too. You could contact customer support and tell them your problem and they could send you a cd to reinstall windows. That could always turn out to be a pain though, as support is often non-willing to help or be helpful. Keep in mind that if you choose to format your computer and reinstall xp, you will lose all the data on your computer and have to reinstall any software you have that did not come with your computer.

DO NOT SAVE FILES FROM YOUR COMPUTER ONTO REMOVABLE MEDIA TO PUT BACK ON AFTER THE REINSTALL, there is a very high chance that THE FILES COULD BE INFECTED.

here are some useful links to further your understanding:

Trojan.Vundo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vundo_troja...

VirtuMonde:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtumonde

memory resident:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/memory_r...

BitDefender:

http://www.bitdefender.com/

SpyHunter:

http://www.enigmasoftware.com/

Trojan Remover:

http://www.simplysup.com/  <---free trial

about BitTorrent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.torrent

BitTorrent:

http://www.bittorrent.com/ <---free

good site for torrent search:

http://torrents.to/

feel free to email me if you need more help.

[e-mail]

Answer 2

first off stay away from registry cleaner unless you totally understand registry editing they can do more harm than good  -lets get to the problem you will need to download a copy of  keyfinder but first you will have to get copy of XP any copy  from friend not a recover disk but a copy of xp put it in your cd drive and restart you pc like f8 you will tap f10  when asked you click on recover it may by pass the product key - if not you have 30 days trail this is were you download the free software called product keyfinder  it will tell you what the product key for your computer is since you are not changing hardware  xp will accept the key it give you if that does work there are other ways to go ...miktill