I work on an IT help desk that upgraded from windows xp to windows 7, so my question is sort of hypothetical as I haven't encountered it with windows 7 yet. A trouble shooting step for explorer.exe not loading correctly on bootup for windows xp was to rename shdocvw.dll to shdocvw.old and reboot the computer. Does this still work as a troubleshooting step for windows 7 or will it not be recreated? I think the shdocvw.dll holds information on display settings for explorer.exe, but I'm not 100% sure.

Yeah....you wouldn't want to do this with Windows 7....you probably wouldn't be able to do this either since it is more than likely a protected system file. SHDOCVW.dll allows Explorer and IE to share the same kinda window essentially...generally renaming system files in Windows 7 is not allowed because of the System File Protection and it wouldn't let you. r/ johnJohn Wildes | Senior Enterprise Architect | United Airlines | Desktop Engineering

The file is recreated on XP because there "windows file protection" keeps a copy. by the way, that copy may be fried as well, so this may be not a solution at all - you'll need to find a good copy. Because of that, Win7 does not keep copies anymore. If you manage to delete it (and system files are protected), it won't be automagically recreated. --pa

To detect missing and damaged files you should do this: Start the command prompt (cmd.exe) with admin rights [1] and run sfc [2]: sfc.exe /scannow Now look if sfc was able to find and repair broken files (create the txt file shown under [2])? best regards André [1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/How-do-I-run-an-application-once-with-a-full-administrator-access-token [2] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929833"A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/

@kes166.... Do you have an actual problem you want to solve...or are you looking for possible troubleshooting "just in case" this happens? r/ john John Wildes | Senior Enterprise Architect | United Airlines | Desktop Engineering

It was a hypothetical situation, just looking for information basically. Thanks

No, the old way is no longer possible. You can't rename delete Windows files (only after taking ownership and giving you pull permissions on the file), they are protected by the trusted installer. Run the sfc command to detect and fix damaged files."A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/