I wrote an article on how to hack your Start button and a reader of this site, Darryl B, has done some digging and came up with some great information on some of the dangers of messing with the Start button. He sent me an article from The Elder Geek.com on using Ad-aware after you change the registry to point to a new explorer.exe file. Apparently, running Ad-aware after you edit explorer.exe crashes Windows!
Also, here is more information he found on using WinPatrol after this hack:
If you use WinPatrol, after you change the Start button text you have to
give Scotty time to recognize a change to the Winlogon Shell was made and
let him alert you. Once you accept it, then it’s ok. If you shut down or
reboot again before that happens, on restart you get wallpaper. Period.
Fortunately, Ctrl-Alt-Del still worked, so I was able to use the Run
command to navigate to Winlogon and reset the Shell, then reboot the
original explorer.exe. After that, I used Start/Run and went back to the
newexplorer.exe and got that set up again, and this time I waited for
Scotty to find it and I okayed it. Also, it seems that once Scottie has
recognized the new Winlogon Shell once, you can switch back and forth with
no worries.
At this point, I don’t really suggest hacking the Start button. I haven’t had any problem but I am pretty diligent on making sure I have current backups all of the time. Which riminds me, how current is your backup?!
If you are going to chance it, I suggest creating a backup of explorer.exe, make your changes, and save your new explorer.exe file with the file name: explorer.exe - basically, write over the original file but make sure you have a backup!!! This way, you don’t have to mess with the registry.
THANKS AGAIN DARRYL!!
I’ve tried this but it doesn’t let me create explorer.exe with res hacker!!