

Interestingly, I can still save files - which I assume uses explorer.exe (which won't load from the taskbar due to the dll problem)). This was a diskless copy, and I no longer have the box, but Microsoft Office will still launch (if the product key can be retrieved from there - if that's possible, tell me how. However, before I do that, I want to make sure that there is a way of saving Microsoft Office, as the options I have looked at to restore both remove Microsoft Office.

Now, I am going to reformat this laptop using the recovery partition. The technician told me that if this was his laptop, he'd be reformatting it. The Event Viewer showed that these problems were being caused by a problem with 'KERNELBASE.dll'. The Full PC scan showed up nothing, and the technician could not find anything malicious in the Startup tab of Task Manager or the list of installed programs. I took this to a technician, who installed Malwarebytes, which did run, but couldn't update. My antivirus software was also prevented from running. I have a problem with this laptop running Windows 8 it will not launch Explorer or command prompt (as administrator).
