Control Panel Broken

[Bob Johnson]

Something happened to the Control Panel program on my Windows XP machine.
Whenever I try to launch it, all the icons on my desktop and task tray
disappear and then reappear in a few seconds, but the Control Panel never
comes up. It appears to be the same sequence of events that occur when you
kill the Explorer.exe process from task manager.

Anyone know what might be happening or how to fix it?

TIA

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Visit http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm and scroll down to
Item #256 (Restore the Control Panel).

[Courtesy of MS-MVP Kelly Theriot]

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:

| Something happened to the Control Panel program on my Windows XP machine.
| Whenever I try to launch it, all the icons on my desktop and task tray
| disappear and then reappear in a few seconds, but the Control Panel never
| comes up. It appears to be the same sequence of events that occur when you
| kill the Explorer.exe process from task manager.
|
| Anyone know what might be happening or how to fix it?
|
| TIA

 

[Bob Johnson]

Visit http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm and scroll down to
Item #256 (Restore the Control Panel).

This actually turned out to be another issue. I had a corrupt CPL file
called vgactl.cpl. I did a Google search on this file, and it turns out to
be a trojan downloader. I was able to track this down by temporarily
removing all the CPL files from my System32 folder and moving them back one
by one until I determined which one was the offending file.

[Courtesy of MS-MVP Kelly Theriot]

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:

| Something happened to the Control Panel program on my Windows XP
machine.
| Whenever I try to launch it, all the icons on my desktop and task tray
| disappear and then reappear in a few seconds, but the Control Panel
never
| comes up. It appears to be the same sequence of events that occur when
you
| kill the Explorer.exe process from task manager.
|
| Anyone know what might be happening or how to fix it?
|
| TIA