xp loads but no icons or tool bars on screen

[gabagoo]

My sister brought me her laptop and windows seems to load and the background page is on screen but there are no icons or start buttons or anything except the background pic. Even the screen saver seems to work.
Tried starting in safe mode and after about 30 minutes it finally loaded and the same background screen and nothing else.
Is there anyway to access anything any other way?
Never seen this before

 

[mikey-Oh]

is the background extended to work with a second monitor?

 

[gabagoo]

nope..... I found I can get into the ctrl alt delete box and thats about it. I have clicked everywhere on the screen with left and right mouse buttons but nadda. very strange

 

[HulkSmash]

try doing
CTRL ALT DELETE

then new task

then type in

explorer.exe

 

[mikey-Oh]

right click on the desktop and display properties?

 

[gabagoo]

try doing
CTRL ALT DELETE

then new task

then type in

explorer.exe

your a genius...it is now got everything up but running unbelievably slow. It seems to have started Norton to run a check so I will wait and see if it finds anything.

 

[SightLine]

Norton itself is garbage and is probably one of the root causes of the slowness.... then again if a laptop came with XP it's probably an older machine which is bound to be a bit slow.

 

[choucove]

I've seen this happen before with a computer infected with malware. It isn't the smitfraud/virtumonde variant that I've dealt the most with lately, but it is very similar.

Please read carefully: NORTON WILL NOT FIX THIS. No anti-virus application out there can catch absolutely everything, and what this usually is is malware, not a virus. When you are able to use the above commands to start explorer.exe, go online and get the latest copy of Malwarebytes (you can download the free version directly from malwarebytes.org) and run a scan with that program first. It's more likely to catch anything causing trouble to the system than Norton.

 

[HulkSmash]

your a genius...it is now got everything up but running unbelievably slow. It seems to have started Norton to run a check so I will wait and see if it finds anything.

haha. thanks man glad i can help.
Try running a malware program to remove some of that crap.