explorer error in normal startup

I hope all of you had a great fourth!

Still working on friend's PC. Posted here few days ago.

Am now able to get into safe mode without errors. Now
working on normal boot problems.

I get the following when doing a normal boot...
Explorer An error has occurred in your program. To
keep working anyway, click Ignore.... To quit this program
click close.

Clicking on Ignore does nothing. Clicking on close in the
error window takes me to another error....
Explorer has caused an error in GDI.exe. Explorer will
now close.

I click on "Close", get "Close Program" window. Nothing
shown running there. Click on "Shut Down" and system does
shut down okay.

Mart advised me to check out Device Manager in safe mode
for duplicates. There were a lot. I deleted every
duplicate that I was permitted to delete. Did a normal
boot and I actually made it to the desktop once it ran
through the add new hardware messages. However, could not
repeat the successful boot even though I went back into
safe mode and deleted dups again! Duplicates keep
reappearing in Device Manager. Examples: Under Hard Disk
Controller, Primary and Secondary IDE controller (dual
fifo) entries appear three times respectively. VIA Bus
Master PCI IDE Controller appears twice. Under System
Devices, ACPI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering appears four
times. And, there are others.

Also, I went into msconfig and deselected the check boxes
one at a time and tried to boot to normal. I was
successful except when I had "Load static VxDs" or "Load
startup group items" checked. With either one of these
selected, I got errors on normal boot.

Thanks again, Mart, for pointing me to Device Manager.

Where do I need to go from here?