Interesting. Normally, if you end the explorer.exe process, it restarts
itself. I didn't think about the fact that a user Shell entry somewhere in
the registry might have a hairball (duh). Or maybe Explorer was trying to
take a nap, and not quite ready for prime time. I'm glad things are
working.
You may want to do this, to see if Explorer is feeling okay:
Right click on Command Prompt, and choose Run as Administrator. Copy the
following, and Paste it after the prompt.
sfc /SCANFILE=c:\windows\explorer.exe
Press Enter. If everything's okay, you'll get a positive, but cryptic, HAL
9000-like message from Windows Resource Protection. If you want to check
all your system files, and some pertinent registry keys, Copy and Paste
this:
sfc /SCANNOW
Press Enter. It may take a few minutes...