problem with left pane of Explorer

[Guest]

While removing massive amounts of scumware and a few viruses from a
customer's xp home sp1 machine, I noticed that the only thing that displays
in the left-hand pane of explorer is the Desktop folder and under that is a
My Computer folder. There is no + sign to the left of the My Computer folder
and double clicking on My Computer does not expand the tree. If you
right-click on the My Computer folder, the Expand option is greyed out.

Note that this is different from the known problem where the entire left
pane is greyed out or blank.

In order to browse the drive, I had to enable the address bar and manually
type in the locations. Once I browse to a folder, the contents are visible in
the right-hand pane, and it seems to be working ok.

I tried playing with the Explorer settings under Tools - Folder Options -
View but nothing is working.

Since there are a lot of registry sub-keys under
HLKM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer, I was wondering if
anyone has a remedy for this other than comparing each subkey with a good
machine?

Thanks,

Jerry

 

[Thorsten Matzner]

While removing massive amounts of scumware and a few viruses from a
customer's xp home sp1 machine, I noticed that the only thing that displays
in the left-hand pane of explorer is the Desktop folder and under that is a
My Computer folder. There is no + sign to the left of the My Computer folder
and double clicking on My Computer does not expand the tree. If you
right-click on the My Computer folder, the Expand option is greyed out.

The virus or the other malware may have damaged the Explorer. Try the
SFC tool and if this does ot help, reinstall Windows:
"Description of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 System File Checker
(Sfc.exe)" (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310747)
"How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade (Reinstallation) of Windows XP"
(http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=315341)