I need your help

[carrots1993]

This one is a little hard to explain, so bear with me. Alright, so I started up my computer one day and all of the icone that i leave on my desktop are gone. I didn't think too much of it and tried to open Avant Browser. A windows box open up that said that the program couldn't be found. Then I tried to open Word and the same thing happened. The only program I can get to work is Wordpad. I'm trying to find a way that this can be fixed without erasing everything and reinstaling windows. Any response is appriciated

Thanks

 

[Harvey]

Have you scanned for viruses and spyware?

 

[daniel49]

sounds viral allrighty

 

[carrots1993]

I can't even open Ad-ware or our norton internet security.

 

[daniel49]

sounds like its one of the variety that doesn't allow you to run an .exe tried an online scan?
could slave it off a second machine to scan it.
steps depend exactly upon what virus you got but I remember having to do some registry editing on a virus once that did that.
just to edit registry had to make a copy of regedit and then rename it regedit.com so it would run and edit out the offending reg entries...first you will need to ID the virus though to determine what to do.
if it only has .exe crippled there are actually 4 extensions that are executable .exe .com .pif .bat