explorer.exe won't run

C

Corporal79

Gawd
Joined
Oct 28, 2004
Messages
889
Latest round of updates on a SBS 2008 machine were installed 8/13 and rebooted overnight. Once it was back up everything appeared it was working. Trying to log in to that server gives an error of

Explorer.exe The Application Failed to Initialize properly (0xc0000022). Click Ok to Terminate the Application

and then the SBS console stops working and I'm left with a blank screen and all I can do is Ctrl-Alt-Delete to open task manager, mmc works, explorer cannot be started from a run window. I can open a command prompt though.

Is there a way to see updates installed by date from cmd and ultimately remove them from cmd as well? I did a chkdsk and sfc already.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
 
Corporal79 said:
Also ran Sophos bootable AV and the system is clean. Any ideas?
Click to expand...

The system is not clean, Sophos just didn't find anything.

The behaviour sounds awfully lot like an infection. Or it might be a corrupted update install, you should try to roll back your machine.
 
B00nie said:
The system is not clean, Sophos just didn't find anything.

The behaviour sounds awfully lot like an infection. Or it might be a corrupted update install, you should try to roll back your machine.
Click to expand...
Agreed, try rolling back to the latest system restore point. You could also try running SFC through the Windows recovery console.
 
First step is the obvious sfc /scannow

Second is to run procmon.exe and filter out everything except explorer.exe. Look for the last things it's trying to do before crashing. There's a possibility that the permissions on a DLL it's trying to load or the behavior of that DLL is crashing explorer.
 
Corporal79 said:
Is there a way to see updates installed by date from cmd and ultimately remove them from cmd as well? I did a chkdsk and sfc already.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

"wmic qfe" This will give you a list of installed updates and dates. Example: wmic qfe list

"wusa /uninstall /KB:" - This will allow you to uninstall by KB#. Example: wusa /uninstall /KB:2980654
 
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