Windows xp Problem: No icons or taskbar appear but background does

irishgeo

my friends laptop boots up fib but no icons or the windows taskbar appear.

The windows desktop background appears but nothing else.

The onyl way to run stuff is by going ctrl-alt delete and using the run command from there. Here is what i tried.

Upgrade to servcie pack 2, virus scan, spyware scan. Deleted the killlist reg key but still no good.

Its appears like explorer.exe doesnt start, i have tried as well to run it using the run command but that doesnt work either.

Any ideas guys.

dahamsta

Do the desktop icons and taskbar load if you run explorer.exe from Run? If it does at least you know it's not explorer.

Seems quite a common problem though, lots of posts and fixes here:

http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&safe=off&q=xp+boot+taskbar+icons+desktop&safe=off

I'd be inclined to try the VBS fix in the second post here first, from the looks of it it just restores settings to the default.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.setup_deployment/browse_thread/thread/cae575828280484c/2453e9435d8141ab?q=xp+boot+taskbar+icons+desktop&rnum=8&hl=en#2453e9435d8141ab

adam