Yeah, it would be a whole lot easier for me to stay in one thread, but because I wanted to work on the .ini business as well as the explorer issue, I thought "forum etiquette" required me to have separate threads!

Interestingly, after I last tried 'Run Sandboxed - Windows Explorer', my Sandbox Control window shows:

firefox.exe
SandboxieRpcSs.exe
SandboxieDcomLaunch.exe
explorer.exe

Explorer still never opened, but at least the 'explorer.exe' line is staying put now (vs. before, when it would just disappear after a few seconds).

Yeah, it is better to keep the 2 subjects seperated so that it's easier to focus on each problem. Back on topic though, im with tzuk on this, the only thing i can think of thats causing this problem is, either something on your pc related to explorer such as shells, or maybe this is some kinda registry error which is why you were able to get it working under the other users account but not yours? Maybe the permissions are different?

I'm not aware of any permissions being different - I've never deliberately set anything up that way. Both Gary and I have administrator privileges, but I'm the only one who ever installs anything on the computer (the only thing about the computer that interests Gary is Hotmail, YouTube, and uploading pictures he's taken). Whenever I install anything, I always select "for all users", given a choice.

I know I was able to run Explorer sandboxed under Gary's account at the very start, but since I started "fiddling" with my settings, I've never been able to replicate that feat. Now that it doesn't work for either account, I don't really know what to look for in those ShellExView reports any more.

There's something else we can try, if you're still interested, and that's to run the sandboxed Windows Explorer inside a sandboxed Windows Debugger, and hope that we see errors that make sense.

Download:
http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols/debuggers/dbg_x86_6.6.07.5.exe

You should even be able to install it into the sandbox. Then see if you can run it sandboxed (even if you installed it outside the sandbox, you will need to run it sandboxed). If you can do that, the next step would be to run explorer.exe inside the sandboxed Windbg.

One thing I was thinking on this one last night is how about just letting Windows create two new user accounts - where everything is on C:\, those new accounts should be pure as to errors. Name them something close RebeccaJ and GaryJ (if your last name was jones) and delete the existing two accounts.

Thanks, Tzuk and Mitch - I don't think I'll have a chance to get on the computer tomorrow, but I'll give it a shot on Friday, or over the weekend at the latest. Will post back after that!

thanx 4 gettin back to us R, remember- we are learning too - GL
mitch

Sorry I failed to post back here more promptly!
Shortly after my last post, I discovered that if I right-clicked on the .exe file of a program I wanted to "experiment with", I had the option of running it sandboxed - and I've been doing that successfully ever since. So while I still am not able to run Explorer sandboxed per se, I am able to try out things sandboxed, and that's really all I was hoping to do in the first place (other than running my browser sandboxed, of course!).
Thanks to all for their time, effort and patience. Chalk up another very happy user!