Bypassing A Login Bug In Windows Xp (sp 2)

I don't know if anyone else had/has this bug with Windows XP but I did. When I would login explorer would not run, there was no way to make it run either. Its a very frustrating bug. So here's how you work around it.Make a new user, to do that launch from the task manager nusrmgr.cpl and create a new user. Then press Win+L and login to the new user.The causes for this bug I do not know, I reinstalled windows a few months back and haven't had this bug since. I don't imagine its common but for those who it effects it can be rather fruastrating and confusing at first.

I've seen this bug happen when I was playing with LiteStep. There's a key in the registry that is responsible for launching explorer.exe. If that variable is missing, the computer will do nothing, and because explorer.exe is responsible for loading all of your programs that run at startup (with the exception of services and boot actions) nothing else on the computer will start automatically. You can find this key in the registry here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. It's called Shell it's of type String (REG_SZ) and it's default value is Explorer.exe.

Note that at this stage, you can always bring up the task manager with CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, click File->Run and run explorer.exe that way.

Interesting, the variant I had didnt' allow me to run explorer, but thanks for the information. I don't know how common it is, it might be only my OEM version but it was annoying. Heh.