I was trying to help my father-in-law with AOL where he is currently paying for AOL and they are offering Free AOL and stuff.  I told him that I would try to download Free AOL at home...and I did.

The setup was giving me problems so I decided to uninstall what it installed but when I rebooted my computer, my desktop did not appear (a black screen appeared only..not even the START button on the left side was there).

I pressed ALT/CTRL/DELETE and opened up Task Manager and typed in "explorer.exe" and I received the following message....

"The Application failed to Initialize properly (0x0000005).  Click ok to terminate the application."

The only thing that TEMPORARILY fixes it is CHKDSK but it only works once and if I try to reboot afterwards, the same error occurs.

I NEED SOME HELP BADLY.  PLEASE   

If you can get into SAFE MODE, run SFC /SCANNOW
You'll need your Windows XP CD.

It is a DEP warning... do you have any tool bars installed on the browser?  also is your system clean?  My guess is that something is piggy backing that IE process from the AOL install..

More on DEP:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875352

Try adding explorer to the list of approved programs.. or AOL..

If it is an xp machine.. just do a system restore.. that will clear up the problem most likely since explorer.exe is a system file..  Just restore to before aol was installed.   You wont lose any personal files..

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/regs_edits/exefix.reg

Placing this on your address bar and running it fixes the problem.  THANK GOD!!!