Not sure if this is appropriate here, but I have recently had a very 
similar problem to Trev's, except as follows:

Windows 98 (NOT second edition) 256Mb RAM.
Boot computer either in full windows or safe mode.
As soon as the desktop (background) screen shows up and the 
mouse arrow comes alive, the startup wave file plays okay, but
less than 1 second passes and I get "Explorer caused an invalid
page fault in kernel32.dll at 015f:bff711be" with nothing else
on the screen.  No taskbar, no start box, NOTHING.  I am able
to shutdown by CTRL-ALT-DEL and selecting shutdown, although 
it does take considerably longer than normal.  

This symptom is the same for both normal boot and safemode,
with the only screen difference being the "safemode" boxes
in each corner during safemode boot.  

What I have done:

- scandisk thorough
- defrag
- scanreg /fix
- scanreg /restore (to a working copy of the reg)
- deleted all the "pwl" files
- deleted the win386.swp file 
all from safe mode command prompt.

I have editted the system.ini file and changed the line
"shell=explorer.exe" to "shell=winfile.exe" to see if the
the GUI would run with the filemanager instead of the
explorer.  Okay!  
Upon exit of filemanager, windows dutifully shutdown,
albeit somewhat slower than normal.

I have also done a selective startup by confirming each
startup option and watching all responses.  I have also
done the same thing as safemode boot by only selecting
HIMEM and nothing else with the same symptoms.

Also have tested the memory chips and hard drive,
system board and i/o controller.

I have read just about every single web page regarding "015f"
and "explorer caused ... kernel32.dll" and tried everything that
I have read but with no success.  

Getting very close to replacing the "98" explorer with "95" and
seeing if it will at least boot. 

Relunctantly getting close to a new install to Win98-SE but I
am afraid I will lose everything on the machine.

Just cannot get it to work!  Am I chasing a ghost or is this
problem correctable?  Help greatly appreciated.

------------------------------------------------------





On Monday, February 24, 2003 at 12:28 am, Frankie Tomato wrote:
>Hi Trev,
>it happened to me several months ago, but... I think I could see at least the Start 
>button and that I did the following:
>   Start > Run > type "regedit" > OK.
>I hope you too can see the Start button, even if you have no icons on the desktop.
>FT

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