when I open windows explorer, the part of the window that used to show the folders/sub-folders content tree is just a solid grey square! how do I get it to display the tree again? I'm running win-me I would greatly appreciate any help in locating my missing tree thanx

Welcome to SAF, DW1161.

Try this: Open Notepad and copy/paste the bold text to it:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}]
@="Explorer Band"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\InProcServer32]
@="C:\\WINDOWS\\SYSTEM\\SHDOCVW.DLL""ThreadingModel"="Apartment"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\Implemented
Categories]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{EFA24E64-B078-11d0-89E4-00C04FC9E26E}\Implemented
Categories\{00021493-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}]


Click on 'File', then 'Save as', then click on the 'Save as type' menu and save as 'All Files'. Name it ExplrFix.reg (it doesn't matter what name you give as long as it has a REG extension). Save it to the desktop for convenience, then double-click on it and OK the message to merge it with the registry. Does that fix it (it may need a reboot)?