I use Win98 on my box, but my dad uses WinXP on his notebook. I drove up to his place today to check it out because I'm the computer person in the family.
Its the wierdest damn thing, and I've had it happen before on my machine - problem was a corrupted program that would load up with internet explorer. But, I removed all programs that should load with internet explorer and had no luck.
Here's whats going on - in the normal boot up under the "Owner" profile (only profile under normal boot up) - internet explorer will not open. Clicking it will start to load it, but it just dies. Using task manager, you can see iexplorer.exe briefly pop up then it goes away. Clicking on My Computer, going to Control Panel, or trying to use the "Find files or folders..." shortcuts causes the taskbar and all icons to disappear while there is some disc activity then re-appear. I've closed out all non-vital entries in the taskmanager section one by one to locate the problem until I was down to the bare bones required to run XP - and nothing helped.
In safe mode, they all open up fine - so I'm thinking there must be something loading in the normal boot up that is causing the load up for anything related to internet explorer (since its integrated with anything thats system browsing) to halt it. There are no error messages at all, I just can't get it to run.
I ran a virus scan through McAfee, with updated virus tables, and it found nothing. I also ran scandisk, and it didn't fix anything.
My WinXP disc is over at someone's house, so I'd have to go for a drive to get it - does anyone have any ideas for getting this up and running? I also did a system restore from a point that was a month ago (this started in the past week and a half), and that didn't help.
Thanks for any help.
-SW