PC cards stopped working after uninstal of hotfixes

I have a Satellite 3005-S307 and suffered a crash which involved my needing
to rebuild my desktop: Explorer.exe wouldn't start. All I got to was a
blank wallpaper.

I had started getting some error message or other and googled it and found
that it was related to some hotfix which I was told I should delete.

Unfortunately I couldn't figure out which one it was so I thought I would
delete all in turn and then either install SP2 or update with one cumulative
patch from the MS site.

I had about twelve of them and was uninstalling all in turn with restarts
when necessary. It TOLD me it was uninstalling and restoring from a backup
of a previously backed up version.

At about the eighth hotfix, I got this problem. When I restarted, I started
getting a plethora of successive error messages telling me that Windows
couldn't access some starting point within shlwapi.dll which I figured was
corrupted and wouldn't start explorer. So I scouted around on a similar
machine for this file and found about four versions. I then tried copying
all of them in turn to the windows\system32 directory and all but one gave
the same error message that it couldn't start some service within this
dynamic link library.

Eventually I discovered that I could CAD from the blank XP wallpaper where
loading windows stopped to Task Manager and then start explorer from the
explorer.exe in a directory called dllcache. I then rebuilt my system from
there and even ran SFC /SCANNOW as well as (obviously) immediately going
back to the MS site and reinstalling all the hotfixes in one package

If explorer.exe is running from dllcache and my sfc /scannow ran from
dllcache, then its results won't have told me anything. And the problem
might well be that explorer IS actually now running from dllcache which is
where I probably rebuilt it from even now after reboot if the OS saved
system settings on exit? I distinctly remember the computer not wanting to
run explorer (or sfc) from RUN in task manager when I tried to do so from
the windows directory

How can I see where it is running explorer from? This might be a starting
point.

Everything now seems to work properly except that I am getting some
unidentifiable error messages on boot into windows including something
involving not being able to run some Java Virtual Machine and an error
message telling me that boot couldn't find hkdrv.sys which no one seems to
be able to identify but which IS in my system32 directory as well as in a
backup directory (with the same file size and date) so it is UNLIKELY to be
corrupted. Again, I may have my whole desktop running from dllcache while
the registry is looking for drivers in some other directory off Windows so
peripherals (including presumably some I haven't discovered yet) wont work.

MY PRESENT PROBLEM is that for some reason OS has stopped sending power to
its PC card slots: Neither of my 802.11b cards work and neither are detected
by XP Pro when inserted. Again, is there any way I can find out whether the
OS might well be running from the DLLCACHE directory rather than from the
windows directory? Anyone got any ideas on how to get the slots working
properly? Computer came with a recovery disc (which has been in any event
lost as has been a few of the software discs over the years) so
re-installing from scratch isn't an option