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Hex Editing Explorer.exe -----Ankit Fadia <ankit@bol.net.in>
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Hit Ctrl + Alt + Del and you will see a Window popup titled End Program. Whenever you hit these keys while Windows is running you will always see Explorer as a part of it's list. It is, what controls how Windows functions. Everything from error messages to the menu that pops up when you right click  a file is controlled by explorer.exe.
To edit it would be something that gives you the power to change everything in Windows. You may be thinking, big deal how difficult can it be to edit a file.Well it is not that simple.You need to know some basic things before you would actually be able to edit it.

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WARNING: First of all before even thinking about editing explorer.exe you must back it up on floppy disk or on a separate folder on your hard disk. It is real easy to mess up with this file and destroy your computer.
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NOTE: READ THE WHOLE SECTION BEFORE EVEN OPENING THE FILE.
OK you have backed up explorer.exe and want to know what to do next.So here goes
First restart your computer in MSDOS, to do this click on Start > Shut Down and select Restart in MSDOS.

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Note: Do not try to edit explorer.exe in DOS while running Windows.It is a read only file and Windows will not allow you to edit.Changing it's attributes and editing it while running Windows is not advisable.
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Once you get the DOS Prompt goto the Windows directory by typing:

C:\>cd windows

Once you are in the Windows directory open the file explorer.exe in the MSDOS Editor with the /70 parameter.To do this type:

C:\windows>edit  /70  explorer.exe

You must be knowing that Edit opens the Microsoft editor, and explorer.exe is the name of the file you want to edit. But many people do not know what the /70 stands for.Well actually /70 just stands for the number of columns across. It sets the number of columns to 70 and makes the file easy to read else you have to scroll like hell.
Anyway this will bring a blue screen that is the MSDOS editor screen with the file explorer.exe opened. The screen would look like full of weird characters or something in machine language.
Well almost.
Let me start by describing what you would be seeing if you followed the above steps.
Now the screen is full of weird characters like a heart , a smiley face or a club or other unrecognizable pieces of junk.
Well actually each symbol you see has a numerical value that you can see at the right bottom of the screen at VALUE:###.
To see what each symbol stands for move your cursor over the symbol and look at the right bottom screen at VALUE:###.
At the bottom you also see LINE: #### which gives you the line number.
You are not going to edit these symbols but edit the part of the files which consists of these unrecognizable characters and text that you actually can understand.The Understandable part begins at line:1336.

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NOTE: The line numbers I am going are on a Win98 machine.I am not sure if they are same in Win95 or not.Anyway to go to the recognizable part in Win95 just scroll down and look for recognizable English.
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When you right click on the Taskbar and select properties then a pop up Window comes up from where you can customise the taskbar.There are options like Always on Top, Auto Hide etc.
Now lines 1336 to 1354 allow us to change text of this TaskBar Properties,you can change text that appears on anwhere in the Window even the text on the various buttons.Now before changing the text just read the following very very carefully.
Now you must have noticed by now that in explorer.exe the text has a space in between them.Now this space is not the space of the spacebar.Let me put it this way, in the file explorer.exe the value of a space from the spacebar i.e. the value of the space that appers on the screen if if click the spacebar once is 32 and the value of the spaces that are there in between characters in explorer.exe is 0.If there was no space in between letters, it would look untidy. 

Another thing that you must have noticed is that there are many &'s in between the characters,well this & signifies that the next charcter i.e. the character that suceeds the & is underlined in Windows .

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The underlined letter is used as a keyboard shortcut in Windows to run that particular operation.Say if the letter s is underlined that the user can press theletter s in the keyboard as the sortcut.
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Lets take an example to make the above more understandable.
Say you want to edit the text on clear button which is the TaskBar Properties window under the Start Menu Programs.
Now originally the text is Clear and you do not like it and want it to be osmething like Klear, then what do you do? 
Goto LINE 1354 and locate &C l e a r 
Now the spaces between each letter is not the space of the space bar(Value=32) but spaces whose value is 0.
So instead of  &C l e a r  I type &K l e a r keeping in mind that the spaces have a value of 0.
If by chance you press the spacebar and want to replace it by value of 0, you can click on any blank space in explorer.exe whose value is 0, and copy Paste it to the space where you want to paste it.
Aster making the necersary changes save the file and restart Windows.Now right click on the TaskBar and select properties.In the TaskBar Properties Window Select the Start Menu Programs tab and voila you see Klear on the button.If you press the K key on the keyboard the button will be clicked, so even the keyboard shortcuts can be changed by editing explorer.exe
The only problem is that I am not able to devise a method to change the length of the word.Whenever I tried to do so , Explorer.exe crashed.

If we go a bit furthur down, then the unrecognizable characters start again.The recognizable editable part starts again only at LINE:2323.
Here we come to the TaskBar properties again.This part of the file can be used to edit the text that appears when we right click on the small clock on the taskbar and also the text that appears when we right click on the TaskBar itself.
LINE:2334 to Line:2348 deal with what appears when you click the Start Button, you can change the name of Shut Down to any wacky name having the same number of characters,you can change anything on the Start Menu,even the Programs to Hackings as they have the same number of characters.
Then further down come the Windows Error messages that we can change to make the boring error messages that microsoft sets to some wacky kewl error messages of our own.
Then at line:2390 comes a very interesting part.This lines lets us change the text on the START button that is START to anything we want, that too of any length.Yes you can have your name on the START button even if your name is 132 letters long!!!
If you see carefully on LINE:2390, you will find that a clubs symbol preceeds S t a r t .If you move cursur over the club you will find that it's value is 5. So the text after the clubs symbol, in this case S t a r t has to be of 5 letters.Now if you want to replace Start and in it's place put something like Stop which is 4 letter long; then you will have to search for a symbol whose numeric value is 4 and paste it over the clubs symbol.Now the text suceeding this new symbol should be of 4 letters. 

For any questions contact me at:
Ankit Fadia ankit@bol.net.in

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