cesium,
Correct me if I am wrong, but much of the windows interface we see, including the desktop and the filemanager/explorer thing (I am talking windows XP) are based on internet explorer.
Incorrect. This was the case for older versions of DOS based Windows, but in Win2K and WinXP the file manager and internet explorer are different applications.
That said, explorer.exe (the file manager and desktop shell) does tend to be integrated into many Windows applications, including internet explorer.
Because internet explorer runs continuously to manage such things as the desktop and file viewing, it opens the computer to many attacks.
Again incorrect. Internet Explorer is not always running. And even when it was the shell, it still only acted as a client, so it only made you vulnerable when you were using it to browse infected websites. What makes Windows passively vulnerable (both then and now), are the same things which make
any OS vulnerable to attack. Namely file-sharing and remote log-in services.
So, is there a way to replace the explorer.exe program with one like , or apple's 'finder', which could allow both a cooler interface and a more secure computer.
In principle, you can replace explorer.exe with any application which provides the ability to start applications. For example, you can ctrl-alt-delete, stop explorer.exe (your taskbar will vanish), and then from the Task Manager start new applications. So in effect, you can use Task Manager as your shell. Or, from Task Manager you could start Cygwin, or even the normal Command Prompt, and use them as your shell.
The only problem is that most Windows apps
expect explorer.exe to be there, and I don't know of any alternative shells which provide access to all of the functions which explorer.exe does.
This would be a bit of a hack, but from my point of view, all that would need to be done would be to replace the explorer.exe with a modded version of firefox/mozilla/lynx/whatever, which could replicate all the functions of windows explorer.
That would be very dangerous, and probably would not work anyway, due to XP's system file protection. I do believe there is a place in the registry, or maybe a configuration file, where you can change what it uses as the shell. And of course, you can set just put a shortcut to the shell you want in the Startup folder, and then terminate explorer.exe from the Task Manager.
Dr. Stupid
