No icons or taskbar just desktop wallpaper?

[kbs24]

I thought I had successfully set up dual boot with Windows 7 on one hard drive and windows xp on another hard drive. At the boot menu, I select "windows xp" and it boots to the XP desktop but there are no icons, and no taskbar. With ctl+alt+del I can get the taskmanager and it appears that everything is running, including explorer.exe. Any thoughts please? Thanks.

[Mike8]

Can you use the start menu/run if so try this.

run regedit
go to: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\explorer.exe
rename the explorer.exe entry to something like explorer.exx
reboot PC


However, do be careful to backup your registry before you try this. And only edit your registry if you have experience of knowing how to do it and are confident of doing so. When doing the edit you can also export the key you are editing before you edit it, so you can get it back.

[Computer Guru]

Kill explorer.exe then start explorer.exe again?

[Mike8]

I would also suggest, first. When booting, make sure that every peripherial is disconnected, such as web-cams, networks, sd cards etc. Windows boots loads of drivers at different times in the boot cycle, anything can cause it to hang at any stage before going into a full desktop. M