I friend of mine on whose machine I installed a dual boot of Precise a couple years ago called Friday and said his Win7 side was "stuck in Explorer".
It happened at the end of an update, which required a reboot. After rebooting and logging in his desktop showed Windows Explorer opened to a "Save" or "Run" page, refering to the FireFox browser. When he clicked run nothing happened. When he clicked save nothing appeared to happen. Every time he tries to open an application it appears in that Explorer page offering the same two options.
I picked up his laptop and brought it home. When I booted it I got the same Explorer page, and for any other app I attempted to run, even from the "Run" box, while attempting to open a console screen so I could run regedit and clear up the bad links. I tried Ctl+Shft+Esc to bring up the task manager and then tried to open a console from there, but that didn't work either. None of the three methods to open a console in Win7 worked. I noticed in the Task Manager that over 600 copies of explorer.exe were running. The first was using 47Kb of memory, the rest just 1.5Kb. I right moused on the first and used the option to open explorer on that directory, highlighting explorer.exe. I renamed it to explorer_x.exe and watched as all but the first of the instances of explorer.exe unloaded. When I "End Process" on the remaining explorer.exe the desktop disappeared, as I knew it would.
I found out that every time the "save or run" explorer page appeared, even when called by system services, one didn't have to click either save or run, explorer automatically replaced the executable with an explorer link.
Since grub was on sda2, the reserve was on sda3, Win7 on sda5 and Kubuntu on sda6 I wasn't afraid of losing access to Kubuntu. I booted into Precise and used K3b to save DVDs of all the important documents on Win7. I ran antiav on sda3 and sda5 and found 10 viruses and 11,900 destroyed executables and files, mostly system. The Win7 installation was hosed.
I rebooted and selected the recovery mode for Win7. It gave me two options: 1) reinstall the system files but leave the data intact. 2) format the C: (sda5 as far as Win7 knew) and reinstall the system. I tried the first and rebooted. No joy. Same mess as before. On the reboot I took the second option. That worked. It gave me a pristine Win7 desktop. I installed MS Security Essentials, then FireFox, LibreOffice and adobe flashplayer, and unpinned Explorer and the Welcome app, and uninstalled Bing, EBay and McAfee. Now his Acer 7250 is in the exact same shape it was in when he bought it new and had me put Kubuntu on it. Since grub defaults on Kubuntu, and following this horrific experience even with MS SE installed and active, I suspect that he will spend most of his time in Precise from now on.
It happened at the end of an update, which required a reboot. After rebooting and logging in his desktop showed Windows Explorer opened to a "Save" or "Run" page, refering to the FireFox browser. When he clicked run nothing happened. When he clicked save nothing appeared to happen. Every time he tries to open an application it appears in that Explorer page offering the same two options.
I picked up his laptop and brought it home. When I booted it I got the same Explorer page, and for any other app I attempted to run, even from the "Run" box, while attempting to open a console screen so I could run regedit and clear up the bad links. I tried Ctl+Shft+Esc to bring up the task manager and then tried to open a console from there, but that didn't work either. None of the three methods to open a console in Win7 worked. I noticed in the Task Manager that over 600 copies of explorer.exe were running. The first was using 47Kb of memory, the rest just 1.5Kb. I right moused on the first and used the option to open explorer on that directory, highlighting explorer.exe. I renamed it to explorer_x.exe and watched as all but the first of the instances of explorer.exe unloaded. When I "End Process" on the remaining explorer.exe the desktop disappeared, as I knew it would.
I found out that every time the "save or run" explorer page appeared, even when called by system services, one didn't have to click either save or run, explorer automatically replaced the executable with an explorer link.
Since grub was on sda2, the reserve was on sda3, Win7 on sda5 and Kubuntu on sda6 I wasn't afraid of losing access to Kubuntu. I booted into Precise and used K3b to save DVDs of all the important documents on Win7. I ran antiav on sda3 and sda5 and found 10 viruses and 11,900 destroyed executables and files, mostly system. The Win7 installation was hosed.
I rebooted and selected the recovery mode for Win7. It gave me two options: 1) reinstall the system files but leave the data intact. 2) format the C: (sda5 as far as Win7 knew) and reinstall the system. I tried the first and rebooted. No joy. Same mess as before. On the reboot I took the second option. That worked. It gave me a pristine Win7 desktop. I installed MS Security Essentials, then FireFox, LibreOffice and adobe flashplayer, and unpinned Explorer and the Welcome app, and uninstalled Bing, EBay and McAfee. Now his Acer 7250 is in the exact same shape it was in when he bought it new and had me put Kubuntu on it. Since grub defaults on Kubuntu, and following this horrific experience even with MS SE installed and active, I suspect that he will spend most of his time in Precise from now on.
Comment