Nash asked in Q&A:
Hi,
Hi,
After boot up, I scroll the mouse to the bottom of the screen but the task bar will not pop up. The only fix I have found is that if I go to taskmanager and shut explorer.exe down and then new task Explorer.exe, it works perfectly. This happens about 50% of the time but only on bootup. It never fails after I relaunch it. Could there be something loaded into the systray on bootup that crashes the task bar? If so, where would I look? It ther a taskbar ini somewhere?
I’ve had this problem just long enough to not be able to recall what was the last thing I installed before it started… And I don’t really use restore points on this system since it’s primarily just an entertainment pc…
This is the first real problem I’ve had with XP.
It may be that you have a fake “explorer.exe” file somewhere on your computer. There is a real one (find it by going to “My Computer”, and then C:\WINDOWS. It should be within the Windows folder. If it is on C:, but not in the Windows folder, it’s probably malware. The same goes if you find one in your System or System32 folders. Because of lazy Microsoft programming, there’s no specific place that Windows looks for explorer.exe, so if it finds it directly on C:, it will open that file instead of the one it wants.
To check if the file you’re looking at is legit, right click, go to Properties, and click on the Version tab. It should be copyrighted by Microsoft Corporation. It should also be 1,008 KB in size.
If you’re comfortable with computers, and sure the file you’re looking at is malware, I’d delete it. You can also run spyware detection (try Spybot S&D) and antivirus (try AVG) programs to see if they sniff it out.
Good Luck!