Hi there,

Whenever windows starts up, a box apperars with the title "cannot find shell.dll" and then when I click "close", a deep blue "help" box comes up with nothing in it. Can anyone tell me what this stuff, is, and how I might remove it? I don't really understand computers at all, and could really use the help.


Thanks a bunch.

Hi creiling, welcome to TechTalk!

Being a new member I'm sure you weren't aware of this, but one of our forum policies is to keep all responses to a given question in the thread in which the question was asked (as opposed to having responses emailed to the member asking the question).

There are two reasons for this:

A) By keeping the entirety of the troubleshoot in the thread, members who who want to help you can see the full, clear history of what has been done and suggested so far. If some suggestions are given only by email, it leaves "holes" in the troubleshoot history in the thread. This leads to redundant and/or off-target suggestions being posted (due to the lack of visible history in the thread), and that just wastes time and causes confusion.

B) We're trying not only to help current members who post questions here, but also to help others around the world who may be experiencing problems similar to those posted here. Many people find our site in the course of searching the Net (through Google and the like) for answers, and by keeping the complete course of each problem's resolution in our forums we can provide those people with a growing wealth of (hopefully) helpful resources.

Additionally, many experienced troubleshooters on tech support forums in general will not answer questions via email, Private Message, IRC, etc. We work on these forums as volunteers, and usually simply don't have the spare time to take on problems on a one-on-one basis. In other words, you're actually limiting the amount of help you could get by asking for that help outside of the forums.

Given all of the above, I've edited your email address from your post; let's keep this "on-board".

Thanks for understanding. If you have any questions about this, or any of our other posting guidelines, please read the full the full set of guidelines here.

The "cannot find shell.dll" error indicates that your shell.dll file is either missing or corrupt. The error is fairly common, and can happen for a few reasons; probably the most common reason being a virus infection.

A lot of information on possible causes of the error (and the fixes) can be found in the links in the following Google search; try some of the suggestions and let us know what you get:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search