Windows Explorer is missing.
What do I do?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com, here's the question I got some time ago.
Microsoft malicious software removal tool
seems to have removed Windows Explorer in my Windows.
What can I do?
So it's extremely really rare that an antimalware tool like
the malicious software tool will remove Windows Explorer. As we'll see in a minute.
It's pretty fundamental part of Windows.
However, it can happen.
So there are a couple of things that I want to walk you through that will help
you diagnose exactly what is going on and what you can do about it.
Here's Windows Eleven, and as you can tell, it's a big black screen.
There's nothing going on.
You can probably see my mouse moving around, but that's about it.
If I hit the Start key, nothing happens.
That's because Explorer is not running.
If you can hit the Start key
and the taskbar shows up, then Explorer has not been removed because
it's Explorer exe that actually manages the taskbar and the Start menu.
So, as we can see in this case, yeah, it's not there.
I can't do that.
So what do we do?
Well, the thing to do is to go control, Alt, Delete.
It's been a while since we've used that keystroke.
Then we'll run and click on Task Manager. I'm using windows.
Eleven. So we'll click on Run new task.
In prior versions, you would hit the File
menu and there would also be a new task or a run option on the file menu.
Click that and I'm just going to type in Explorer and hit OK.
And now all of a sudden, our desktop is back.
The Start menu is back, the taskbar is back, explorer is back.
It had not been removed from our system.
Now, if in a situation like this Explorer
had not come back, then we would have done something else.
In fact, I'm actually going to make Explorer go away.
I'll do what I did to start this.
If I click on Explorer here in the details view in Task Manager and say end Task
poof, I'm back to an empty desktop and no Start menu.
In fact, I can hit the Windows key, but Start menu never comes up.
This time we'll run a different task.
I'm going to assume for some reason that Explorer XE didn't exist.
That for whatever reason,
I tried to run it and it gave me an error of not being found this time.
Instead, the new task that I'm going to run is SFC Space scannow.
That is the system file checker.
And in fact, for this one, I'm going to go ahead and create it
with administrative privileges just so that it has all the power that it needs
to to potentially replace files that need replacing.
And off it goes.
It is running the system scan.
It will take a little bit of time.
I'll let it complete.
The important thing here is that what SFC does is it actually looks for missing
and damaged files in Windows itself and restores them from a backup copy.
In this case, if Explorer XE is truly missing, SFC should be able to restore it.
Now. What if SFC fails?
Well, then things get complicated.
If SFC cannot restore Explorer exe
and it's literally not on your system, then you actually have very few options.
You could try to do a repair install
of Windows using bootable installation media, because without Explorer,
actually there's a whole lot of stuff you can't do.
So you'll actually need to boot from recovery media or installation media
and then run the repair tools from that the other option, of course.
And this is something that I keep saying over and over and over again.
If you'd had a backup, you'd simply restore the backup image,
the backup image from before this problem having started.
If this problem was due to malware,
then the backup image would not have the malware that potentially caused this.
So this is another case where your backup
image acts as a safety net and will allow you to deal with a number of the issues
that are related to things like Explorer XE having gone missing.
But as we can see here, SFC is cleaning up.
It's not going to find anything because nothing's broken.
I forced the issue.
So since we forced the issue, I'll do what I did again.
Explorer as the new task.
And boom, I've got my desktop, my Start menu, and my taskbar all back again.
Hope that's helpful.
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I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.