Stop Explorer from opening window to C drive after booting

[videobruce]

I'm running Win 7 Pro x64 if at matters. Never had this issue before.
I did a long search and I was surprised with the number of hits, including ones that actually want Explorer to open a window at startup. I don't, just the opposite!

Below seems to represent many of the supposed solutions, none that work in my case.
Fix Windows Explorer Window Opening on Startup

I did the basic; looking in the Startup folder,
running MS Config looking under Startup,
I even opened Autoruns v14 from System Internals, but there are so many tabs and entries, it's hard to decipher most of them.

The Registry 'fixes' didn't apply, either because the corrections were already there, or the actual entries weren't, which meant nothing to edit.

I even ran a couple of virus scans which did find some recent 'nasties' which were removed. Nothing showed in 'Resource Hacker' running that shouldn't be there and no other unusual behavior.

 

[eidairaman1]

Have you ever ran system restore? What was tge last thing you did before you started having this problem?

If no dice format the drive and start over

 

[Shihab]

Have you checked for some random entry in the task scheduler? Anything that spawns explorer.exe (even for paths other than C:/) on boot/login? Could also be a part of a batch/powershell/js/etc script (which would be the annoying part).

 

[videobruce]

No to system restore, I never set that up, I usually rely on image backups which was lacking also for other reasons.
No to task scheduler which I have never used. I never ran programs that can be scheduled.
Formatting the drive with multiple partitions is overkill.
I had a issue (corrected) regarding activation was the last thing I did IIRC.