Hello all... I have a Compaq Presario 5000. 900Mhz Athalon, 320M ram. My CDROM recently died and I replaced it with a Samsung CDRW/DVD ROM (model#TS-H492A). I had problems getting it to work.. I believe some files were corrupted because it started effecting my video and mouse... it was a mess. So out of frustration, I used the restore disc to wipe my PC clean and returned to factory conditions. Everything seems to be going reasonably well except now when I use Windows Explorer... the left window pane (which usually shows what drive you're looking at) is gone. The "folders view" is selected but the window pane is all greyed out.

I did some reading before coming here to ask for help, and I believe it's tied to Internet Explorer (I use Mozilla Firefox). So I went to microsoft and downloaded IE 6 and all updates etc. thinking this might solve the problem... it did not.

Any direction or assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance...

Mike