no desktop icons

[Tyson82]

Hey.

Ive got this Emachines system Im looking at for my Aunt.

It is running XP Home, was SP1, Ive changed that as one of my attempts.

So she tells me that out of the blue, all of her desktop icons disappeared. It is more than that though. Everything is gone from the Desktop, no icons, no Start Menu, no taskbar. Even right-clicking on the desktop yields nothing.

The only way to run anything is by using the 'new task' option from the Task Manager. From there Im able to run just about anything you can normally get to from Explorer. Ive have run the lates SpyBot, Ad-Aware, and AVG. Found about 65 entries between SpyBot and Ad-Aware, nothing with AVG.

I used Spybot to bypass all of the entries in the startup file.

Absolutely nothing has made a difference.
The computer runs fine in all applications, a little slow, but thats a 2 gig Cely for ya. Just no desktop.

Any help is appreciated.

Thx

 

[Malak]

At new task, type explorer.

 

[Tyson82]

Originally posted by: Malak
At new task, type explorer.

I dont get anything at all. I even browsed to c:\Windows/explorer.exe and nothing

and explorer isnt listed in the 'processes' section of task manager


also, I just noticed that in Safe Mode, I can type explorer in the 'new task' run line and it does load explorer. But it immediately shuts it off. When it does the safe mode info window comes up. So I can see it listed in the processes window, but as soon as I kill that window, explorer is shut down.

 

[rmrf]

do you know if she was trying to "clean" some of the unused files off of her computer?

 

[Tyson82]

she said that she didnt. But I dont really know. She isnt computer literate.

 

[Malak]

Windows is corrupted, reinstall.

 

[Tyson82]

Im really hoping for another solution. She lost her Emachines disks. I guess I can use my OEM disk and her COA...

 

[Slicedbread]

Try this for the the taskbar Taskbar Repair tool
it was mentioned on techtv here so its not shady.

 

[Tyson82]

Originally posted by: Slicedbread
Try this for the the taskbar Taskbar Repair tool
it was mentioned on techtv here so its not shady.

no good. I get a runtime error regardless of what I try to do with it.

 

[Malak]

Originally posted by: Malak
Windows is corrupted, reinstall.