Hey folks, I have a bit of a tough question and was wondering if anyone had a similar experience.

I have an Compaq QuickRestore Windows98FE CD for my Presario 5284, and it works great! Well that is until I try to start using the PC after completing the QuickRestore process.

What happens is that I am unable to execute any programs via Explorer. I can Win+R execute programs, but I can't open up say, system properties, any programs from the start menu, desktop icons, desktop properties, and even if I Win+E to open up My Computer, I can not dig into my drives/sub folders. Even using the keyboard it's the same issue, I press enter to go into a folder or launch a program via Explorer, absolutely nothing happens!

What's really weird is that I can still click things within an application, I can even close file explorer windows, and shut down windows via the start menu, so it's not my mouse. I tried updating to Windows 98 SE- no go, still broken. If I install a newer version of IE the problem is temporarily resolved but seems to come back on its own.

I even tried to use this archive.org image for my system, the problem persists! So weird! : https://archive.org/details/CompaqQuickRestor … ario52XXCracked

I have a feeling I'm out of luck here, some sort of software bug in the Compaq Provided image, but I'm wondering if anyone has had an issue like this before? The system ran Windows 2000 before it was given to me, and it ran it just fine- albeit slow of course.