Ive just had to do this again today, and it came back to me how much of a pain in the arse it was before i new what had happened.
You reboot your PC, its loading up, but it just stops at your desktop wallpaper. Nothing loads, the mouse whizzes round the place when you move it, but no desktop icons, no taskbar, and well, this deep down feeling of oh no im up the creek without a paddle.
I know this feeling as i had this feeling once before two.
So, what has happened, well basicly, Explorer.exe hasnt loaded. Thats pretty much it really, now it could be something else but its probably that, to confirm this, ctrl+alt+del on the keyboard and the trusty taskmanager still loads. look threw, oh damn, no explorer.exe. So what do you do now. Well usually its just been moved to quarentine in your antivirus programme. Someone has been using the computer, its popped up, they have pressed delete instead of heal, or the antivrus has advised to delete it,(yes i know, its a major system file but some AV'S really remove it, take Kaspersky for one, it has just done it again now and we are on verison 7 lol) so yes the dumb user not reading properly has deleted it.
So dont panic, i can hear you say well if its in quarentine but you cant load explorer.exe what the hell can i do, well its simple,
load taskmanager again with ctrl+alt+del. In the top corner you will see file, click it and then click NEW TASK RUN
You will be met with your run box, some may be aware of this others probably have never seen it in your life. In the box type CMD and ok
you will be met with a black DOS box, now this where it gets fun, most people have probably never used DOS. but its really simple, and can become fun when you not panicing about your computer being broke.
So first things first, ill do this the slow way incase you dont know the directory to your antivirus programme.
In the black box type
cd C:\ and click ENTER
then do DIR and ENTER
Your looking for PROGRAME FILES So next you type
cd PROGRAME FILES and ENTER
then type DIR and ENTER again.
you will have the contents of your programme files directory just like you would of EXPLORER.exe was running but without all the fancy icons, This was how computers used to work way back in the past, Honest lol.
So now your looking for your antivirus prgramme, mines kaspersky, so i want to type
cd Kaspersky Lab and ENTER
type DIR again and ENTER
for some reason kaspersky has yet another folder to go into, AVG is the same and i think so is avast, you could just got straight to it but seen as this is how i did it the first time im doing it this way
so next its
cd kaspersky internet security 7.0 and ENTER
type DIR again and ENTER
KAspersky flew along with all kinds of rubbish but its avp.exe you need to run as a example, i duno what AVGs .exe is called or avasts but by clicking on the .exe that looks promising usualy does it lol.
so just type avp.exe and ENTER
and blam, your antivirus programme is thier, go to the quarentine and take explorer.exe out of quarentine, but dont give up thier, it is infected at the end of the day, so either use the ativirus properly to heal the file, or hit the internet for a programme to heal your infection, you could also do SFC /SCANNOW but thats a diffrent topic, but it will at least get your computer up and running again so you can fix it properly.