%thisdirname%

Well guys I think I might as well start a weekly help thread for me. :D

My boss has a older laptop that has WIN 98 on it. I have no idea about the specs yet, but I took a quick look at it today, and whenever you turn it on, once it starts to load winows I receive a Explore.exe has caused an illegal operation message.
However, windows continues to load the desktop, but the background is a folder like window and in the top left window it says
%thisdirname% (The percent signs are part of the name.)
Then below that it says the contents of this folder are hidden. Click here to unhide the contents. But when you click it it shows nothing. Also if I go to his "my documents folder" and try to open a file up it gives me a Illegal Operation for Explorer again.

this ones really got me puzzled.
Anyone have any Ideas?

does your boss have any idea when this started happening? I mean has the laptop always doen this or has it only recently started? If this was my lappy, to be quite honest I'd get all the data I needed off it - (by the looks of things you may have to do that from the DOS prompt or safe mode), repartition and reformat the HD (and repair the MBR) and reinstall windows (or another OS whatever tales your fancy). Something like that I wouldn't even bother to find out what was wrong because you could spend ages looking for the answer and not find anything.

Z

[edit]

having had a quick look round - this might interest you. to summarise, try reinstalling IE

http://perils.pamelajoy.com/2003_01_01_pe.php

According to him, the power was flickering, then the computer rebooted and when it did it started doing that.

I'll probably have to do what you said. Go to teh DOS prompt and copy all his docs to a floppy then reinstall.

sounds like the user.dat file might have become corupted. open the run boc and enter "SFC" without the quotes. this will bring up the system file checker which will scan and replace bad files.....might help!