• Lisa,

I apologize in advance if this post does not solve your problems, and in fact does not even sound very helpful, but maybe it will be educational, and help you down the road..

I had a box in the lower right hand corner of my screen (while online) that said web rebates.

O.k., first question: How did the "box" get there? Stuff doesn't just appear by itself out of thin air. There are two options:

• You either installed the garbage yourself, by willingly clicking on an alert window and telling the system to install the malware, or
• you have set your security option in Internet Explorer to an unacceptably low level.

If the first is not the case, then in IE, go to Tools->Internet Option->Security and click on "Default" for the Internet zone. In the first case, in the future, never, ever install software that some shady website or other is offering to install for you. Be sure you understand precisely what it is you are installing before doing so. If you meet someone in the street, and the person says: "Here is a nice pink pill, take it, it's good for you", would you swallow that pill? What would you think of a person who does that?

I went to control panel and saw WebHancer in there with rebates and 2 others so I removed each. 

Two questions:

• What were the "two others"?
• How did you "remove" them? By simply deleting the icons? You should never delete programs or control panel items by simply deleting files willy-nilly. That procedure is certain to get you into trouble, as you have seen...

Have McAfee Virus Shield, Privacy and Firewall loaded.  Also use spybot and AdAware and run often.

None of that stuff is of much use or help to you if you do not use a reasonable amount of discretion. In particular, using anti-spyware software is no substitute for sound judgment on what software to install. You need to understand that a piece of software that you allow to be installed on your computer can completely destroy your system, and no software in the world is going to help you after that has happened (with the exception, of course, of a good backup program, in conjunction with you making backups).

Also some programs won't work now- I can click on them and the hourglass come up for a couple of seconds and nothing happens.

I thought you said you have no taskbar nor icons, so what is it you are clicking on?

Do not know what to do.  Please Help!!!  Have tried booting in safe mode and didn't help either.

Well, from the information you gave there is really no way to know what has happened. If I understand you correctly (but I am not sure, see above), you have no access to your computer at all right now. If that is the case, your only recourse is a repair reinstall of XP. Put your XP installation CD in the drive, boot from the CD, and follow the prompts for a repair installation. This will not delete any of your data, and it should result in a bootable and useable system. Nevertheless, at that point I would tend to recommend you save your data on some external media and perform a complete clean reinstall of CD, which includes reformatting your hard drive.