I'm running Win2K sp6 on an older machine. This issue began very suddenly and I can't seem to get a handle on it.
After bootup and logging in, under any account including Administrator, I can briefly see the usual desktop icons and toolbar for a brief while, but then the screen goes blank in whatever the background color for that account is (light blue, for example). There is no response if I try to left-click (to change desktop settings). I have to soft-reset and log out or restart, to get out of this.
This also happens in Safe mode, and with all combinations of msconfig that I've tried so far.
I tried safe mode into command prompt, and tried running explorer.exe from the command window. Explorer starts, shows me the task bar, and the explorer window, but then shuts down by itself, taking the task bar with it. Checking processes with Task Manager indicates that Explorer.exe has shut down. Something is apparently shutting explorer down immediately, and it's happening even in safe mode.
If I do it very quickly, in normal startup, I can usually get one quick task running before it all goes blank. So I've looked at the Startup group (empty), run regedit and looked at the usual Run, RunOnce and Runservices groups (nothing different or new there).
It may be that explorer is crashing, but it doesn't give me enough time to get to event viewer to see if there's an error before it goes blank.
An attempted repair of Win2K made no difference
Can anyone point me to a place to start troubleshooting this?
Update
I managed to get into event viewer and found a d'oh! sort of message in the app log, saying that the shell stopped unexpectedly and explorer.exe was terminated (no, really?) with an event ID of 1002.
This was good enough to get me through the KB and discover that the problem was something had replaced shell32.dll in system32 with a version that is vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks. There, the utility of the article stopped, as the instructions for replacing it WILL NOT WORK. Because the file's in use, natch. So there will be a sharing conflict if you try. You need to boot into something else that supports NTFS, in order to do the replacement. I used WinTernals, and grabbed shell32.dl_ from my windows CD. That did the trick. It's probably not the "current" version, but now I'm able to see and operate, so I can go get whatever the correct version is.
