Shell Software

As a newbie to these forums, I hope I am not breaking any TOS, but I have run into a problem with a shareware package named Aston Shell (at that name dot com) which is a shell for the Windows XP desktop.

It seems to work fine until you go to uninstall it, at which point, after you reboot, you have NO user interface at all. The only way to recover is to use the system restore back to a point prior to when you installed the AstonShell.

I cannot tell if this is merely poorly written software as opposed to intentional malware, so I am not certain if this post is appropriate for this forum.

Wilders seems to have no other mention of this issue that I could find...

 

did a quick search and im guessing teh software just has a poor uninstaller. a few others have teh same issue.

 

Yep that's the problem with Aston. Reinstall Aston again and then you can restore the Windows XP Explorer shell either by manually pointing the shell back to explorer.exe -open regedit (press start, then Run, then type Regedit) and drill down to the key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Winlogon and make sure that the "shell" entry is set to "C:\Windows\Explorer.exe". Also, go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Winlogon and set the "shell" entry to C:\Windows\Explorer.exe".
That should restore your shell to Explorer.
Then uninstall Aston.

or
Install ShellON:http://www.majorgeeks.com/ShellON_d219.html
and use it to reset shell to explorer.exe and then uninstall ShellON if you're finished with Aston.
ShellON lets you switch shells so you could leave it on and switch between explorer and Aston whenever you want.
Good luck.
Lee

 

Thanks to all! A thorough scan with the latest AVAST and Windows Defender confirmed that nothing fishy is going on, so it looks like the Aston uninstall simply has a few rough edges.
I am much relieved!