My Compaq Presario laptop running Win98 SE with IE6, was attacked when I went to a website tonight. Running SpywareGuard...tried to change IE homepage, search, etc. I clicked NO to all the changes. Afterward, I couldn't open any programs. Tried to run AdAware and Spybot...would't start. Looked for something running in the background...nothing there. Attempted reboot...gets to Windows start sound, then I get "Explorer - This program has performed an illegal operation and will shutdown". Same in Safe Mode. I can't get to the desktop, I can only get to a DOS prompt. What can I do from the DOS prompt? The details of the error message are listed below:

Explorer caused an invalid page fault in module Explorer.exe at 0167:00401f31
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=0167 EIP=00401f31 EFLGS=00010202
EBX=00000001 SS=016f ESP=0080feec EBP=0080fef4
ECX=00000001 DS=016f ESI=00000000 FS=278f
EDX=0080fefc ES=016f EDI=00000000 GS=0000

Bytes at CS:EIP: 8b 08 50 ff 11 8b 45 08 50 8b 08 ff 51 08 8b 45

Stack dump:
00401ee0 0080fefc 0080ff34 00405cac 00000000
00000000 00000000 00000001 00404436 00000000
0059fc0c 00000001 00000000 00000000 00000000
00000000



"Calling All Angels"

Open a command window
(DOS Prompt) and type:

sfc /scannow

This is System File Checker and it
checks if any system files have been replaced.

It will ask for your 98 CD.

Another thing you could try is to restore the last registry backup by booting into that DOS prompt and typing scanreg /restore

Problem fixed...Forgot DOS commands...Many thanks for both replies!!!

Restored to earlier copy of the Registry...sfc found a couple problems...problem fixed.