Upon a more critical inspection of  the "...\run" area, I found references
to several somewhat "official" sounding programs which turned out to be
remnants of spyware and/or trojans.  One value was calling  "kerneI32.exe"
(note the clever spelling), and a second was calling "ms spool32.exe".  It
was the second value that was causing my problem (since, as Peter suggested,
the .exe was not present in the directory that the key pointed to), and once
I deleted it Windows explorer stopped launching on startup.

Thank you, Peter, and everyone else who posted suggestions.

George


> Have you checked the "...\run services" area of the registry? I forgot
> to mention it - that happened to be the one that troubled me for a
> while.

> Check in the registry ...\run area and see if there is any reference to
> a file that is no longer there. A missing file can launch an explorer
> window - the folder that the file was located in is opened since the
> file is not there. This happened to me some time back and it took some
> sleuthing for me to figure out what had happened.

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                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>