PC hangs when booted/Explorer doesnt work

[superflyguy]

Hi there,

I have a PC with Win 98 OS loaded on it, whenever I boot my PC up it successfully loads Windows but then after the main screen appears with the icons and toolbar the PC just hangs. The mouse is still active but my PC doesn't allow me to activate any of the icons, when I try to access the bottom tool bar this is inaccessible as well, with the hour glass icon appearing when the mouse hovers over this area. Pressing Control-Alt-Delete brings up the message that Explorer isn't responding.

I have tried booting my PC in safe mode and also using the CR ROM to boot it but all to no avail. I cannot run any disk checker utilities or spyware remover programs as my PC will not let me access the Control Panel to run these programs as mentioned above.....any help would be gratefully received to resolve this issue, G

[mjc]

Grab a boot floppy (the machine does a have a floppy drive, right?) and then when booted, type C: at the prompt.

Then cd c:\Windows

If the boot floppy is a full 98 boot disk, then it should load several utilities into a Ram drive...

type edit system.ini

if not... copy system.ini a:\

Then change the line

shell=Explorer.exe

to

shell=progman.exe

Save the file (and/or copy it back)

Reboot...

That should bring up program manager, instead of explorer. It is a bit harder to navigate, but it should allow you to scan for errors.

You may want to save a copy of the original to make it easier to change it back...or you can edit it in Notepad.