Windows XP Professional does not load explorer.exe

As one of two technical people at my company I am one of the people who gets called on whenever there is a hardware or software issue of any kind. We have tried to school our users on the dangers of attachments and have implemented software to attempt to prevent viruses entering the network but sometimes they do slip through. Today I had a tough time diagnosing a problem with one of the machines running Windows XP Professional.

Initially, the computer was just very slow and started with pop ups so I followed the tried and true method of cleaning using Spybot Search & Destroy, AdAware and HiJack This!. After running these three programs and restarting the desktop (i.e. explorer.exe) would not load at all, not even in Safe Mode. Needless to say, panic started to set in! We were running ClamWin on that specific machine and well, I hate to say this but, it is crap. It does not protect the computer actively and cannot remove many of the infections that were found on the system. So I put a proper antivirus program on there, Kaspersky 2009. This was able to find infections but could not remove a particularly troublesome one that was disguised as svchost.exe. So after browsing Google for a while I was able to find a reference to SDFix.exe which solved most of my problems. After downloading and following the instructions the desktop once again loaded and Kaspersky was able to destroy the other infections.

So I’m going to add SDFix to my arsenal of spyware removal tools and so should you!

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