My explorer.exe has gone wacky

Recently, I have encountered some issues. Apparently, my popup blocker died on me for whatever reason (I blame my roommate) and she was wiping out the screens when the computer 'froze.' Those are her words. She rebooted it (I'm still scratching my head about that) and it won't restart.

Here is what I know. Windows will load and it gets to my desktop but no icons appear and the taskbar also does not appear. When I start the taskmanager, it shows that explorer.exe is running at 75-99% of the CPU (75 initally because some other programs use the CPU). I've tried everything I know of (which isn't a great deal, I'll admit). I should also point out that if I terminate explorer.exe, I have typical speed and can open all of my applications (I'm assuming all because I only tried a dozen).

Any help or advice would be much appreciated. If I missed posting some vital information, just let me know.

PopBing

one way you can fix is to do a windows fix jsust put your windows disk in and do a repair that will replace all your winodws files which should sort it out for you its probaly due to a corrupt file iyou wont lose any of your own files it just reinstalls the main windows files for you
regards
JJ

I would have to disagree wtih the above post. It is most likely a virus; that may have corrupted explorer.exe. When Windows loads, explorer.exe is the GUI that a user interfaces with (i.e., the start menu). It is a favorite of viruses. It's not uncommon for a virus to re-write your registry so that windows loads a variant of explorer.exe. This post should probably be moved to the anti-virus forum for further help. Please read the Sticky in that forum and post a Hijack log for us. This will let us see what's trying to load when windows boots. Run a complete virus and spyware scan in safe-mode as well (make sure your definitions are up-to-date).

Hi PopBing and welcome to Dev Shed.

I am moving this thread from Windows Help to Anti-Virus protection as like seack79, I also believe that this is the work of an infection.

Can you download, update the definitions and run Spybot S & D, Ad-Aware, Ewido free and Trojan Hunter. After you have ran all these programs, run a thorough Anti-Virus scan. If you don't have any AV software on your pc, have a look at using AVG Free or doing an online scan at Panda Active Scan or at Trend Micro Housecall.

Once you have run these programs (which may take some time depending on the size of your hard drive, number of files etc), run HijackThis and post the output log on here for us to look at.

Thanks alot for the help. I ran Spybot S&D, Ad-ware, Ewido free and Trojan Hunter as well as using AVG Free. My system is up and running now and I have icons and a task bar. I haven't gotten a chance to run Hijack This yet due to time constaints (that stupid thing called a job). I plan on running that this weekend and will post the output log. Once again, Thank you.

Glad you got your computer back up and running....

No problem. If you could still post a HJT log though just so we can make sure your machine is clean.