Explorer/shell question.

[James Sutherland]

On Sun, 11 Feb 2001, Rob Landley wrote:

> I don't personally use windows, but I have a lot of
> friends who do.  I just showed a friend 98lite.net
> (which has apparently gone commercial in the last year
> or two; I was actually looking for the list of
> instructions the used to have on how to replace the 98
> I.E. based explorer with the 95 filesystem only
> explorer and delete I.E. from the system).

Their free download can do this if you wish. There's also a simple .INF
file which removes the browser only.

> Unfortunately, the 95 explorer, being MS intellectual
> property, can't be included with 98lite, they have to
> have a copy of 95 (pre OSR 2.5) lying around.  I
> vaguely remembered this list discussing cloning the
> filesystem explorer months and months back, so my next
> thought was to wander over to winehq and see if you
> guys had cloned the filesystem explorer in such a way
> it could potentially be cleaned up and used to browse
> the filesystem so I.E. can be deleted.  I didn't find
> one here, so I'm guessing the outcome of said
> discussion was "no, we aren't going to do that", but
> it seemed to be a question worth asking anyway.

You could try downloading Windows 95 Service Pack 1: that should have a
copy of explorer.exe etc. in :-)

> So: has anybody simply cloned the 95 explorer yet? 
> Would the clone run under windows itself?  How deeply
> does it have its tentacles into the guts of the rest
> of the system?  Where would I go to look for such a
> thing?

IIRC, Explorer digs itself in pretty deeply, with various undocumented
calls and hooks into the OS. Should still be possible to clone/replace, if
you wanted...


James.