Found this fix tucked away on the ‘net.
A customer’s PC was heavily infected with trojans and viruses, including the SmitFraud 888 toolbar.
Whilst the infection had been cleaned up, the XP PC still refused to boot into Windows desktop. Attempts to manually launch explorer.exe yielded the response that the file c:windowsexplorer.exe could not be found.
Expanding a new copy of explorer.exe did not fix this little problem, but the following solved the trick:
1. Run Regedit
2 Locate and delete the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionImage File Execution Optionsexplorer.exe
3. Reboot.
Problem solved
