No task bar or icons in 98SE

[Maggotry]

My mother called and said when her pc boots, she gets no taskbar or icons on the desktop. Hitting ctrl-alt-del (to call up task manager) shows that explorer and systray are not running (actually, nothing is running) which I suspect is the problem. No idea why they aren't running, though. Booting to Safe Mode does the same thing...no taskbar or icons.

Specs:
Win98SE
Epox 8KTA3 (I think)
GF2 MX200
SBLive!
Creative modem (don't remember which)
850MHz Duron
256M RAM

She has Norton SystemWorks Pro 2002. Is there something in those utilities that could help? I'll be calling her tonight to try to help. Any idea's or suggestions would be appreciated. If nothing else, I'll install XP for her when I go up there for Thanksgiving (she's 250 milse away).

Is there a way to manually start up programs when you have no icons or Start menu?

 

[networkman]

Kind of a long shot, but is it possible mom changed(accidentally) the available desktop size, such that the resoultion is say 640x480, but the desktop is 1024x768 and the screen is positioned over in the upper right corner of the "desktop"? I've seen this before and it would account for the problems. 😉

If this is the case, she should only need to move the mouse pointer over to the left and down to find the taskbar and then change the settings.

* Okay, this wouldn't account for Safe Mode, so maybe this isn't it. 😱

 

[Maggotry]

I just got another e-mail from her. She said she was playing a game called Pop-It on a site called pogo.com. Everything was going fine, then suddenly all programs shut down, taskbar disappeared, icons vanished. She had to hit the reset button and now is faced with the situation I described above.

 

[Bullhonkie]

Check to make sure explorer.exe is being loaded as the shell. You'll probably have to do this from the DOS prompt if you're unable to do anything in Windows. Open up your system.ini file and look for a line that reads:

shell=

Make sure it's set to explorer.exe.

Is there a way to manually start up programs when you have no icons or Start menu?

I know you can with the NT/2k/XP task manager. Don't remember if you can on the 9x-based OSes. 🙁

 

[Maggotry]

Originally posted by: Bullhonkie
Check to make sure explorer.exe is being loaded as the shell. You'll probably have to do this from the DOS prompt if you're unable to do anything in Windows. Open up your system.ini file and look for a line that reads:

shell=

Make sure it's set to explorer.exe.

How do I do that from DOS? Boot with a 98 boot disk then type "edit system.ini"?

I know you can with the NT/2k/XP task manager. Don't remember if you can on the 9x-based OSes. 🙁

Yeah, I've been away from the 9x OS's a while myself. 🙂
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try that tonight.

 

[Bullhonkie]

Originally posted by: Maggotry
How do I do that from DOS? Boot with a 98 boot disk then type "edit system.ini"?

Yup, that should work.

 

[Maggotry]

Originally posted by: Bullhonkie

Originally posted by: Maggotry
How do I do that from DOS? Boot with a 98 boot disk then type "edit system.ini"?

Yup, that should work.

I did that from the root c: directory. The system.ini file was blank. Is this the right directory? If it is, do you know a way to create a "generic" system.ini file?

 

[Maggotry]

OK. I checked the system.ini file from the \windows directory. The shell=explorer line is there. I ran scanreg /fix. It found an error and corrected it. No help. I ran scandisk. It found an error and corrected it. No help. I ran scanreg /restore. Of the 5 entries, only 1 of them would restore. The others gave errors saying it could not be restored. That didn't help either. If mom was here in town I wouldn't even screw around with this. I'd zap that drive and install XP. But, since she's 250 miles away, I can't do that.

Any other suggestions? 🙁

 

[Bullhonkie]

Whoops! Sorry about that. I must've had a brain lapse when I last posted because as you found out there's no system.ini to be found at the root of the drive. 😱

The scanreg /fix is what I would've recommended next, but that's usually a longshot and in my experience it has never really solved any problems. Sounds like a relatively serious problem at this point. I'm out of ideas but someone who knows the inner workings of 9x well might be able to suggest something (assuming you can find such a person). Otherwise it looks like she has to wait until Thanksgiving unfortunately. 🙁

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I caught your post in the DC forum and thought I'd try to help 🙂 Did you try having her run Norton's utilies like disk doctor, windoctor, and fast&safe? They are good tools and though the next point is moot since you're putting XP on there, if she was using GO BACK that comes with SW2002 she could have used a restore point just like in XP. BTW, is her Nav on auto-scan with it set to do a full scan at least once a week and liveupdate for her virus definitions with a active subscription? If all else fails you can walk her through a 98se overlay install over the phone as I've resolved some issues with that OS in the past that I couldn't pin down, that way the settings don't get nuked either. Good luck and I hope she's up and running ASAP again so those WU's start flowing 🙂

 

[Maggotry]

Did you try having her run Norton's utilies like disk doctor, windoctor, and fast&safe?

The pc won't function from a windows environment so can those utilities be ran from DOS?

BTW, is her Nav on auto-scan with it set to do a full scan at least once a week and liveupdate for her virus definitions with a active subscription?

Yes. The pc scans every Saturday morning and liveupdate is active.

If all else fails you can walk her through a 98se overlay install over the phone as I've resolved some issues with that OS in the past that I couldn't pin down, that way the settings don't get nuked either.

If we install 98 over itself, will she have to reinstall all of her drivers?
Thanks for the help.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I haven't used norton with 98se before but if she made recovery disks she can use the features on the CD by booting from the recovery disk I believe, but you can check symantec's site and make certain about that. As to the overlay install, you won't have to replace anything as all the settings will remain the same but if there's some corrupted OS files and such it will overwrite them.