I had a client PC recently that was badly infected with numerious viruses. After cleaning most of them, Windows XP finally booted back up but the desktop was missing. I could access task manager but could not run explorer.exe. REGEDIT.exe was also "Disabled by your administrator". The same thing showed up in Safe Mode. Finally, any .exe file I tried to run did not work.

After a little research I came across the following articles that were very helpful.

http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-9082-explorer-exe-corrupted-or-infected

http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-8895-regedit-is-disabled-by-the-administrator

Tags: Windows XP | Explorer Disabled | explorer.exe | REGEDIT | Virus