WIN+E shortcut to explorer doesn't work

[Asuman]

Hello Friends,

I'm running Windows Vista on my system. The problem is that my shortcut keys to open explorer.exe doesn't work. Whenever i try to pen explorer with the shortcut keys WIN+E it gives me an error message stating that this file does not have a program associated with it. Can any body tell me why i'm unable to open explorer? Can nay body help me out to resolve this issue? Would be grateful to you if any body help me out to resolve this problem.

Thanks a lot.

[Devasis]

A possible solution would be to define your own application to be the shell. No Explorer shell, no taskbar, no start button, no start button shortcuts. All this requires is a change to the registry key that defines the shell application.

You would have to reboot to make this registry change effective or you could try to change the key and then destroy the Explorer process.

If you replace the shell and kill the Explorer, it will start your application as the shell. Make sure that your application is checking whether its already in memory so that it's not running two instances.

[Solomon]

Chances are that another installed program is confusing it or it's been disabled by a group policy change or reg hack. But you can install WinKey to see what the keys are mapped to and make a new shortcut if you need to or try and remap it back to default. That's assuming Windows Explorer opens normally if you use the start menu shortcut. If not, I would suggest a virus scan.

[MrChris-]

Unfortunately unmanaged C++ is really the only way to go here.

Writing in-process \shell extensions in managed code is actually a very dangerous thing to do because it has the effect of injecting your managed code (and the .NET Framework) into every application on the machine that has a file open dialog.

The problems occur because only one version of the .NET Framework can be loaded in a process at any given time (other shared components such as java and msxml have the same property and thus the same restriction).

If you write your shell extension using the 2.0 .NET Framework and an application built with the 1.1 .NET Framework uses a file open dialog, your shell extension will fail because it can not run on an earlier version. Things can get even worse if your shell-extension manages to get loaded in a process before another applications managed code does: your extension may force an existing application onto a different runtime version than the one it was expecting and cause it to fail.

Because of these problems we strongly recomend against using any single-instance-per-process runtime or library (such as the .NET Framework, java, or msxml) in an in-process shell extension.

[Calvin K]

You can use Wine Tools or simply setup a correct path under Kmenu for your program select Menu Edit and give the path before saving the program menu item. Its been a while since I have done this but it is possible.