Desktop Hijacked and now gone

teemeece · Sep 8, 2005

Before I begin sifting through every thread I wanted to put my problem out there to see if this is a spyware related issue or if I need to visit another topic forum. My desktop is gone... when I reboot there is nothing but blue screen. I am fairly certain it is the work of a series of nasty viruses. I have a fair arsenal of antivirus and spyware programs that I run daily but, somehow, something got through the cracks and I have now lost my windows desktop screen. This happened about 9 months ago and after weeks of fixes, patches and help from this forum, I ended up reloading the entire WinXP Pro OS. I downloaded the SPs again and kept Spyware Doctor running 7/24. Despite my efforts it's back again and I have no taskbar, icons, start menu, etc; just a blue screen. I have run HJT, Spybot, NoAdware, Adaware, Registry Mechanic, CWShredder, CrapCleaner all from safe mode. No luck. Now when I reboot it goes into a My Documents explorer window. This at least allows me manueverability to get to regedit, C prompt and other locations. But nothing has fixed my problem yet.

Before I reload the OS a second time (and it will only allow a NEW installation, not a fix, repair or upgrade)... I pose my problem to the "king" of fix-it boards. I'm all ears if anyone has suggestions.

Thanks
Tee

chaslang · Sep 9, 2005

This is typically a sign that explorer.exe is not loading. It could be missing, corrupted, or the registry key locations that load it my be broken. There have been many of these problems of late. Some are straight forward and easy to fix but most are not! There were even some case where an antivirus program was preventing explorer.exe from loading. Strange thing was that explorer.exe was not even infected.

I do not see any old messages from you on Majorgeeks where you worked through this problem before. In fact you only have two messages. Are you sure you worked your problem here?

Does it work okay if you boot in safe mode?

You should follow our standard cleaning procedures given below and let's see where it takes us.

- Run ALL the steps in this Sticky thread READ ME FIRST BEFORE ASKING FOR SUPPORT: Basic Spyware, Trojan And Virus Removal

Make sure you check version numbers and get all updates.

- Very Important: Make sure you tell us the results from running the tutorial...was anything found? Were you unable to complete any of the scans?...Were you unable to download any of the tools?...Did you do the on-line scans as suggested? etc.

After doing ALL of the above you still have a problem make sure you have booted to normal mode and run the steps below:

- Download HijackThis 1.99.1

- Unzip the hijackthis.exe file to a folder you create named C:\Program Files\HJT

- Do NOT run Hijack This from the Desktop, a temp folder, or a sub-folder of C:\Documents and Settings, or choose to run it directly from the downloaded ZIP file.

- Before running HijackThis: You must close each of the following:your web browser, e-mail client, instant messenger, and programs like notepad, wordpad, MS Word etc. And any other unnecessary running programs.

- Run HijackThis and save your log file.

- Post your log as an ATTACHMENT to your next message. (Do NOT copy/paste the log into your post).

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Desktop Hijacked and now gone

teemeece Private E-2

chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member

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Desktop Hijacked and now gone

teemeece Private E-2

chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member

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