Unable to see desktop

Hello. I'm having problems with seeing my desktop. When I start my computer, I cant see anything, only the background. I cant see the short-cuts or even the start bar thats supposed to appear on the bottom of the screen. It's just blank, except for my screensaver.

 

However when I opened my task manager through the control-alt-delete button, I tried to manually open a program from there. When I opened a random program, everything reappeared again like normal. However another problem came up. I love playing online games, and it says it cannot connect to the internet. However the internet works since I can browse through websites normally.

 

I checked the process section on my task manager and it was loading less programs then before, like something is missing. I also noticed when before the short-cuts appeared that the explorer.exe process wasnt on the list of processes, and that when they did appear, it was there again. Any help please?