A friend of mine somehow completely screwed up his computer by visiting "inappropriate" sites. It is now a spyware/malware quagmire. His wife who is fairly computer competent tried to reformat the hard drive and all she succeeded in doing was removing explorer.exe from where it is supposed to be (or this may be a result of something they have been infected with). I have a few problems now. I have removed some of the spyware and such with Spybot. I can't even get a web browser open to download Ad-aware. Unfortunately, the most stubborn spyware on there opens up its own website and shuts down IE when you try to navigate away from it. I found out also they are only on SP1a of WinXP. I made a disk at home of software to help i.e. Ad-aware, Hijack This, etc. and a copy of Firefox to get around the IE issues. My real two questions are is there a way to retrieve the CD key from their installation of Windows legally? Reason being that their father built his for them and they have the original disc (Verified to be a true copy) but they don't have the COE so I can't do a clean install. Second, to prevent a format and to make the system more stable, what do I have to do to get explorer.exe back to where it was? Right now it says it can't find explorer.exe in the A: drive. Please insert the correct disk. Obviously windows is searching for explorer.exe there but I know that isn't right. And Windows comes up but acts ridiculous so explorer must be where it can find it but is corrupt (maybe)? Thanks for any help.