or otherwise known as the “why doesn’t explorer.exe load up when i boot vista?” solution.

Let me preface the following with this statement: It took me FOREVER and a day to find out how to fix my problem. One day, i decided to boot up my laptop (Gateway 6831FX) and lo and behold:
No desktop. Just a blank, black screen and my moveable mouse cursor. I had to manually CTRL-ALT-DELETE and RUN a new process, which was explorer.exe to load up my desktop. However, i noticed that not all of my desktop icons were present. In fact, windows vista aero features were gone. My sidebar was gone and some of my other startup programs were not starting up.

Starting to sound familiar?

Now, after a ton of research online and my adamant refusal to reinstall vista- i came upon the solution. But let’s backtrack a bit before I get to the solution. Let’s see…

I restored my computer to an earlier restore point, prior to any updates- it didn’t do a damn thing. That black screen still appeared.

I ran spybot, Adware, and some other spyware/malware programs to purge my system of anything that might be bad. it didn’t do a damn thing. That black screen still appeared.

And ran a full system sweep with Norton Antivirus. it didn’t do a damn thing. That black screen still appeared.

Now, here’s where the frusturation starts to mount. If you were to go ahead and google search “vista explorer.exe not loading problems” or some variant of that search, you’re bound to find message forum posts that allude to THIS solution:

But here was my problem. My shell already said explorer.exe. It was fine! 95% of the solutions online talked about bad spyware infections or virus infections that append themselves onto this registry entry. But again, i wasn’t affected and thus, back to banging my head against my keyboard…aahgagakjgakjgrgrjagr..or something to that effect.

Other suggestions included running a command prompt box (as administrator) and typing in sfc /scannow. Apparently this would tell me if anything was wrong with my system files.

It did, and this produced my first clue as to what was wrong with my computer.

Next, i tried running chkdsk /f/r from the same command prompt box to check my system drive and repair any corrupt files.

First snag. chkdsk told me it couldn’t run but asked me if i wanted to run it on the next scheduled reboot. Sure i said. Did it? Nope. Something was wrong.

Let’s go back now to the log file that sfc /scannow gave me. After scouring the file, i saw that I had 3 files that were beyond repair. autochk.exe, userinit.exe and TSChannel.dll.

See that light shining down on me? Yea, me neither. But in retrospect it was there the whole time.

You see, autochk.exe is the scheduler that runs the chkdsk command, or something to that effect. So what I did is I booted up my Vista install disk and went to the repair options screen where I ran chkdsk from my vista install cd. This supposedly repaired some files (when in reality it made my userinit.exe file a 0 byte file).

Ok, so let’s do a quick rehash. I have 3 bad files, i can’t run chkdsk from my OS drive because one of the corrupt files is the scheduler program which interacts with chkdsk and my userinit.exe file is corrupt and zero in size which is stopping my desktop from loading when I boot. I know, the logic preceding that paragraph doesn’t say that, but that was my conclusion after this was all said and done.

Ok, so now i needed these 3 files and replace my bad ones. I found this advice on another website after MUCH digging around.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/86959-access-vista-install-dvd-files.html

It’s a lot to do, but oh so worth it because in the end - you don’t have to reinstall windows!

But wait, there’s still more work to be done. The next step is to replace those files with your brand new, shiny files from the vista install disk. Vista requires you to take “ownership” of the sysem files before you can move or overwrite them. In order to do this, you need to complete a 2 step process (both occuring in a command prompt box running as administrator):

At the command prompt, input takeown /f filepath .

In my case it was takeown /f c:\windows\system32\userinit.exe

Hit Enter

And then type:

icacls filepath /grant yourusername:f

In my case it was icacls c:\windows\system32\userinit.exe /grant Gateway:f).

Once you do that 2 step process with your old, corrupted files, you can then copy in your new files from your vista install dvd and overwrite the old files.

I typed this up because i know there are others out there who, like me, hit a brick wall. After a bunch of research I think it’s only fair to help others out after they’ve helped me.

Let me know if I can be of any other help

jeeplaw