w98 no desktop

[pinhead]

Siste's PC, running w98, and it won't boot to the desktop in either safe or normal, it just stops, no icons nothing, but it does load the wallpaper. Ran f-prot in dos mode and it found a few items in the pestpatrol quarantine file. But it still won't load, and when the wallpaper shows up I can hit ctrl=alt-del and the task manager is empty of anything running.

Tried a dirty load of the os and got a message I've never seen. It said I already had and os and it couldn't run setup. This was the exact same disk I used to install the os last time I slicked the machine, it's a w98 second edition disk.

Any syggestions? Any other AV programs I can run from dos to check it? Thanks

 

[FrankSaucedo]

Try this......
hit ctrl-alt-delete, from task manager click new tast, type explorer
it typing explorer does nothing, try "c:\" instead
tell us what happens

 

[pinhead]

Not being able to dirty load is what seemed odd to me, I've done that a million times and never have been told I couldn't as long as it was the same version. At the moment I have it booting to winfile.exe and am running pestpatrol. After that I'll give what you said a try. I'll post what happens. Thanks....

 

[pinhead]

it's w98 so ctrl-alt-del gets me the close program window and no chance to run anything

 

[THUGSROOK]

use scanreg.exe to restore an older registry from DOS.