Hi there!
I'm writing a little program that needs to replace the Explorer.exe file with my own version of explorer.exe
This has always worked fine under Windows98; but WindowsME seems to have a built-in function that 'protects' all systemfiles, and when you restart, the original explorer.exe is restored.
Does anyone know how to bypass this protection, or know what criteria ME uses to identify the systemfile as being 'modified' (like size, date, ...)
It's really important that explorer.exe is replaced with my own version, so using the registry or win.ini to load the app is impossible !
Any help would be very appreciated!

You can get a program to load my editing "C:\WINDOWS\System.ini" SHELL=Explorer.exe to what ever you like and Explorer.exe will not load.

PS.
I have only done this on win95,win98 and win98se.

Yes, I'm aware of this, but I really need to *replace*
the original explorer.exe with my own explorer.exe, which will in place (after entering the correct password) run the original explorer. For the original explorer to start as a shell, the system.ini setting called shell= has to be explorer.exe!
Also, because it's a kind of security program, it is important that no entries are written to the registry or any windows files are modified (because users will notice) and it has to load before explorer.exe.
But thanks anyway for the suggestion

Have you tried replacing the file via a batch file. I gather from your second post ("because users will notice" that you are writing this app for others to use. If that is the case you'll have to do all of this programatically.

Either put the copy command as the first entry in your autoexec.bat, or put it in a separate bat and call it from the first entry in your autoexec.bat. There's a parameter to keep dos from prompting the user if he/she wishes to overwrite an existing file as well.

Hope this helps,
4oh4

If I am not mistaken, WindowsME repairs your system files... This is one of its few 'features'. I suspect that in order to get your program working, you will have to reinstall windows and make sure to disable this autorepair feature.

I didn't checked this but there must be a kind of dllcache dir into /windows, with a copy of explorer that could be replaced just in case, on win2000 you have to change the both files so the crc checks between the normal and cache dirs are ok.

There is a hidden directory called dllcache which holds the backups (at least in windows 2000, i assume it is the same). Rename this folder, ovewrite the original and the one in the dllcache and then rename it back.