• if windows 2000 has popped up the "explorer crashed" dialog box. there is hope. when this happens, the task bar goes out, the desktop goes dead, and all your icons disappear, a lot of other stuff, but that's not worth mentioning. 
  When this occurs, if you hit cntrl-alt-delete it will pop up the "task manager" (in most cases). 
  When your "explorer" crashes, the first thing you should do is not panic. 
  you are going to want to pull out the task manager (by hitting cntrl-alt-delete). 
  then goto the menu tab "File", click on New Task(Run..). 
  when the box, pops up, type in cmd. 
  Once you do this, a black box representing the dos prompt will appear. 
  Click in this box, then type in explorer. 
  By doing this, it will recover it's self and all your work will be back as if a crash never happened :)
  
  

more will be coming, w2k is pretty solid, so i haven't had to resort to _many_ work arounds :)