Can't use the start button

[krellnor]

Win 2000 boots to the desktop fine. However, when I move the mouse to the
start button it changes to the hourglass and stays that way. Nothing will
work. No menu pops up etc. Any help is appreciated.

 

[Enkidu]

Win 2000 boots to the desktop fine. However, when I move the mouse to the
start button it changes to the hourglass and stays that way. Nothing will
work. No menu pops up etc. Any help is appreciated.

Try this: Hit Ctrl, Alt, Delete and select Task Manager. Find the
"explorer.exe" process on the processes tab, and end it. It should
restart. See if that fixes it.

Do you by any chance have Sygate Personal Firewall? I had an issue
similar to yours, and the solution was to kill the spf.exe task. I
believe that I only had to do it once.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[krellnor]

I tried your suggestion and restarted explorer.exe and everything came up.
However, upon reboot the same thing happened. I have Mcafee antivirus and it
has detected no virus on the computer. This just started a few days ago and
it's a pain to keep using task manager after a reboot.

 

[Enkidu]

OK, that's good. It shows that something is not letting the desktop
comes up completely at start up.

Try disabling the the McAfee software and see if you still have the
problem. You may need to find the configuration item in McAfee that
starts it at boot time, or you may need to (temporarily) remove the
McAfee link from the startup folder, otherwise it may try to start up
at boot time even if you disable it while the system is up.

If that doesn't work, see what applications are active in Task Manager
before you kill Explorer. (The reason I picked on McAfee is because
I've seen this happen with other Virus products at times.) Try killing
them one by one. Try to identify them first!

Cheers,

Cliff

I tried your suggestion and restarted explorer.exe and everything came up.
However, upon reboot the same thing happened. I have Mcafee antivirus and it
has detected no virus on the computer. This just started a few days ago and
it's a pain to keep using task manager after a reboot.

 

[krellnor]

Ok I disabled McAfee. Nothing is loading from the startup folder. Desktop
etc. won't come up unless I kill explorer.exe and then run explorer again
from task manager. Any other thoughts and thanks for the help so far.

OK, that's good. It shows that something is not letting the desktop
comes up completely at start up.

Try disabling the the McAfee software and see if you still have the
problem. You may need to find the configuration item in McAfee that
starts it at boot time, or you may need to (temporarily) remove the
McAfee link from the startup folder, otherwise it may try to start up
at boot time even if you disable it while the system is up.

If that doesn't work, see what applications are active in Task Manager
before you kill Explorer. (The reason I picked on McAfee is because
I've seen this happen with other Virus products at times.) Try killing
them one by one. Try to identify them first!

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Enkidu]

When you bring up the Task Manager with Ctrl/Alt/Delete is anything
shown under the Applications tag? Also is anything using a lot of CPU
on the Processes Tab? Tip: Click on "CPU" at the top of the column to
sort in CPU order. You may have to click it twice to get the highest
one to the top.

Cheers,

Cliff

Ok I disabled McAfee. Nothing is loading from the startup folder. Desktop
etc. won't come up unless I kill explorer.exe and then run explorer again
from task manager. Any other thoughts and thanks for the help so far.

 

[krellnor]

No Cliff. Nothing on apps and cpu usage is about 2%.

When you bring up the Task Manager with Ctrl/Alt/Delete is anything
shown under the Applications tag? Also is anything using a lot of CPU
on the Processes Tab? Tip: Click on "CPU" at the top of the column to
sort in CPU order. You may have to click it twice to get the highest
one to the top.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Enkidu]

Mm, I'm not sure I can help further. What I would do is do a repair on
your system, but I've not done one so I can't advise you there.

By the way, if you hit the Ctrl+Esc buttons, that should bring up the
Start Menu, but my guess is that this will also hang.

Cheers,

Cliff

No Cliff. Nothing on apps and cpu usage is about 2%.