Explorer.exe not starting on boot-up and etc

[Kakkyo]

I have a friend's laptop that I have been trying to kick back into shape and after gutting out the malicious viruses and malware I find that the system on every other reboot has a problem loading explorer.exe. To add something to the mix, when it does start-up, the load the machine has on boot-up take forever clear out and sometimes it will crash the machine.

I don't believe it has SP2 on it, would it be safe to say that after SP2 that things could just resolve themselves? Are there any other tweaks that can be looked into for improving start-up? I have gutted what I can from the msconfig settings.

Anyone want to shed some light on this?

[Titus]

It is likely you didn't find everything (and won't), and it is also likely that you have lost needed system files. If it were me, I would re-format and re-install.

[black roadster]

It is likely you didn't find everything (and won't), and it is also likely that you have lost needed system files. If it were me, I would re-format and re-install.

This would certainly be the surest way of fixing it but it is the suckiest.

[Dave04]

Yes... you're at the point where starting over from scratch will actually be easier. I did this over the weekend with Katie's computer. It has a nasty ad-ware thing that wouldn't let you visit the web sites you wanted to. Luckily for me, Sony puts a ghost image of the origional drive on the end of the drive (hidden) and makes it real easy to start over with.