Explorer.exe missing... Help please

[Lychee3000]

/10charsss

[Sephiracle]

Hello everyone,

I am writing this from my laptop since my desktop computer does not run (I think?).

What happened was that my antivirus, Avira Free Antivirus, found a virus of some sorts in I think explorer.exe, and I kept on clicking on remove when the prompt came up or something... I don't remember exactly what happened but I know that my anti virus kept on beeping at least 3 or 4 times.... Then I got the prompt that Windows is shutting down since explorer.exe was terminated or whatever....

Anyway, when my computer restarted and I logged in with my username (there's only 1 user, me, and I am the admin on my computer), it shows my desktop wallpaper but I can't see the desktop icons, the start button, the taskbar and I do not have internet connection on the computer. I checked that the explorer.exe file is not there in the task manager under processes. I tried to add new task and put in explorer.exe but it said that is cannot be found and I need to check the name and try again. I also typed in C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe but still did not work... got same error message. I browsed my C:\WINDOWS directory and I did not see explorer.exe... I only see explorer.scf... I googled the solutions on this laptop and I tried to find if the explorer.exe was anywhere in WINDOWS or in system32... but no luck... I did not see it anywhere. I tried putting in my windows XP CD and did sfc /scannow in the new task from the task manager and that ran for like 45 minutes... but no prompt showed up and then I restarted... It still had no effect...

Please help me fix my desktop computer... Good thing I have my laptop so I can post this thread... If anyone needs any more information, I will gladly post it....

Thanks in advance.

Hum, what version of windows?

[Lychee3000]

/10charsss

[Janaa]

Sounds like a format and reinstall is in order. It's detected a generic packager which in many cases is a false detection, however explorer.exe doesn't contain any packed executables, so it's almost certainly a virus infection.

You can try to remove it with various tools - an Avira representative offered a lot of help to one such victim in this thread: http://forum.avira.com/wbb/index.php...hreadID=143069

However, if you're still having issues, you'll need to reformat and reinstall. At the very least you're going to have to run a system repair from your Windows CD in order to restore explorer.exe.

[Syctris]

Download an anti-virus on a usb stick, yours isn't doing anything. It is embedding (The virus) into explorer.exe and thus if you cancel it, it closes windows. I would suggest putting one on a flash drive and running it off of there to clean the infection.

[Lychee3000]

/10charsss