Erratic desktop/system behavior.

[C J.]

Just when I thought I'd seen everything, a problem has finally surfaced that
really has me stumped. Hopefully, someone here has seen this problem before
and walk me through fixing this. The Pc I'm working on for a friend is an
XP Pro SP2 system, with 1 GB ram, and 300 mb hardrive.

Friends complaints were: while attempting to use a shortcut to a program,
and/or view "properties" of a file or folder - regardless of file or folder
location on drive C - their desktop content and taskbar disappear, and then
re-appear (background image seems unaffected.)

In the case of their Desktop shortcuts not working, I can go into any
Program files folder and by directly clicking on the Exe - program runs
normally. I've got it to the place now where their shortcuts will work
intermittently but its still a problem.

Friend also told me there were a few files in "My Docs" that were
compressed, and that a couple needed to have their compression attribute
turned off for a program to open the file(s).

When right clicking on the file or folder, and selecting "properties" from
side menu - the same behavior as with shortcuts has been occuring.

Scanned their System for Malware, or signs of viral infection. Results came
back clean. Friend explained they noticed this behavior with their system
after performing routine drive maintenance.

Evedently, After doing a clean boot of XP - they ran Disk Cleanup and
followed that up with scheduling Chkdsk /F/R to run at next reboot, prior to
doing a defrag (which wasn't necessary.)

They reset Services and Startup axis' via Msconfig for normal startup.

 

[C J.]

Just when I thought I'd seen everything, a problem has finally surfaced
that really has me stumped. Hopefully, someone here has seen this problem
before and walk me through fixing this. The Pc I'm working on for a
friend is an XP Pro SP2 system, with 1 GB ram, and 300 mb hardrive.

Friends complaints were: while attempting to use a shortcut to a program,
and/or view "properties" of a file or folder - regardless of file or
folder location on drive C - their desktop content and taskbar disappear,
and then re-appear (background image seems unaffected.)

In the case of their Desktop shortcuts not working, I can go into any
Program files folder and by directly clicking on the Exe - program runs
normally. I've got it to the place now where their shortcuts will work
intermittently but its still a problem.

Friend also told me there were a few files in "My Docs" that were
compressed, and that a couple needed to have their compression attribute
turned off for a program to open the file(s).

When right clicking on the file or folder, and selecting "properties" from
side menu - the same behavior as with shortcuts has been occuring.

Scanned their System for Malware, or signs of viral infection. Results
came back clean. Friend explained they noticed this behavior with their
system after performing routine drive maintenance.

Evedently, After doing a clean boot of XP - they ran Disk Cleanup and
followed that up with scheduling Chkdsk /F/R to run at next reboot, prior
to doing a defrag (which wasn't necessary.)

They reset Services and Startup axis' via Msconfig for normal startup.

Did a little poking around after making this post lastnight. The first -
place I decided to go and look was into was the Event Viewer. Found some
Winlogon events listed where "the shell stopped unexpectedly and
Explorer.exe was restarted." Could this be or mean Windows Explorer is
damaged? Can it be fixed??

 

[Nightowl]

Did a little poking around after making this post lastnight. The first -
place I decided to go and look was into was the Event Viewer. Found some
Winlogon events listed where "the shell stopped unexpectedly and
Explorer.exe was restarted." Could this be or mean Windows Explorer is
damaged? Can it be fixed??

Hi CJ

I doubt Explorer is damaged -- more likely the shortcut problem is
causing it to barf and restart. You might like to try MVP Doug
Knox's .LNK file association fix, available here:
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/fileassoc/linkfile_fix.zip

I hope this helps. Let us know how you get on

 

[C J.]

Took a educated guess and figured because of the Winlogon Events - that
Explorer was damaged. Decided to try running SFC from the admin account. PC
and both problems are fixed.