Double Clciking Desktop Items causes Desktop Icons/Taskbar to Disappear

[BruceLeeBoy]

I ran into this problem this morning and have not been able to fix it. This is happening to my desktop PC which runs Windows XP Home.

When I double click any icon on my desktop (My Computer, My Documents, Recycle Bin), all my desktop icons, as well as the taskbar, disappear for about 10 seconds and reappear. The system tray, which had Symantec Anti Virus and MS ActiveSync, now shows nothing (even though they are still running when I check the task manager). This happens everytime I double-click a desktop icon. I can right click and choose Explore for My Computer, My Documents, etc., but I just can't open any of them using the "Open" option or double-clicking.

I have tried system restoring (my computer says it is unable to restore itself to any point), defraging, ad-aware-ing, virus scanning... all to no avail.

Please help.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Unforgiven]

sounds like your explorer.exe is restarting itself. are you getting any kinds of error messages? im not familiar with xp home but if there is an event log you may want to check that and see what the error messages are (if there are any).

 

[DanTMWTMP]

agg! i forgot the program name....but there's a prog to refresh all icons....you can probably google search for one. I know tweakui has one, but tweakui is more for win2k and 9x..i think

It seems like the desktop is refreshing itself. Try just killing explorer.exe in task manager and run it again (file, run, type "explorer", enter)

See if there are any other background processes you don't recognize that might effect explorer.exe

 

[L1FE]

I agree that it's most likely explorer.exe dying and then the system restarting it. This would explain why your start menu system tray disappears. The programs will only reappear in the system tray if they are active/you restart them. Have you installed something new to the system that may be causing instability?

 

[BruceLeeBoy]

I'm not getting any error messages and I haven't installed anything new recently.