Start menu and all icons disappeared

Question

Please help if you can. When my son's computer boots up at college he now has no Start menu, taskbar or icons - just his wallpaper.
He can use Ctrl-Alt-Del to access the task manager to run his program. We have tried restore, run antivirus and adware programs.
Can anyone help us with this problem.
Thanks in advance.

Baseball Mom · Answer

Thank you for your quick response. He is updated with Norton Antivirus. I will advise him to go to the website and try it. Will let you know if it works. I have been reading the message boards and it seems we are not the only ones with this problem going on.
Thanks again!

akahan · Answer

Please let us know how it goes; as mentioned, there are other issues that could also create this problem, so there are other things we can try if the first-proposed solution doesn't work.

volcano11 · Answer

These are the symptoms of a virus that is now widely circulating. Does you son run antivirus software with up to date virus definitions? In any case, I suggest he run a free online virus scan at:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Steve

akahan · Answer

His problem is that explorer isn't starting up. There are a number of possible causes of this, and each cause would have a different fix. The most LIKELY cause, in my experience, is that he got hit by the F-Nimda virus.

Go to this link and read the text there:

ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/shellfix.txt

He'll need to use a different (working) computer to put the fix file (a registry modification) on a floppy drive), then go back to his computer, floppy in hand, and run the file on the floppy as described in the text file above.

The file to put on the floppy is here:

ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/shellfix.reg

akahan · Answer

shellfix.reg is at the address i put in the email earlier in this thread.   Again, because there are MANY possible reasons that explorer isn't opening for you, running shellfix.reg (follow the directions in the .txt file) may not solve your problem.

smcer98 · Answer

I am having the same problem as baseball mom.  I lost all my icons and toolbar after I ran spyware and ad aware.  Where do I get the shellfix. reg?  Is there a website or something I need to go to?  Thank you!

smcer98 · Answer

Thank you for your help.  At this point I am willing to try anything to try and get my items to return.  Thanks again!

Baseball Mom · Answer

Update on trying to fix the problem. Failed to mention but he has a 2 yr old Dell Dimension desktop running Windows XP Pro.
He has tried Safe Mode, shellfix.reg and trendmicro housecall.
No success on any of these fixes.
Any more suggestions out there?

akahan · Answer

Sure!   Check here:   http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q256194

Baseball Mom · Answer

Wish I had good newes. That did not fix the problem. Thanks for your efforts.

Baseball Mom · Answer

Thank you. I have just sent the link to him. We will let you know how it turns out.

akahan · Answer

Just for fun, he also might want to try RIGHT-clicking on his blank desktop to see if doing so produces a little menu that has 'Arrange icons by...' at the top.  If he gets that, and selects it, one of the items on the list that would then pop up would be 'Show desktop icons'.  If that's not checked, he could try checking it, and see if the icons come back.

Baseball Mom · Answer

Right clicking does nothing. No menu appears. The keyboard start button does not even work. He did look in running tasks and explorer.exe is not listed and doing a new task on it does not help.

Baseball Mom · Answer

We will try this when we can - and you are right he is disgusted. I offered to drive the 5 hours it wld take to get there to help but he said no need to. Problem we have is he did not take his computer disks with him. Hope to see him before too long so we can reinstall if we have to.
Thanks again so much.

smcer98 · Answer

When I try the suggestion by Microsoft 'cmd.exe' in the task manager I get a black screen that has a c:\ command.  The next step says to switch to the %system root% folder but I don't know how to do that.  Is there anyone who can walk me through this...Thanks!

Windows General

Start menu and all icons disappeared

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