desktop loading problems

ok for some reason i turned on my computer today and it loaded fine, at the login i put my password, it took awhile to load, then when it loaded all that it showed was my background, I cant right click, i cant go to start, i dont see ANYTHING but my background picture. I tried to do a system restore, nothing happin. It just kept doing the same thing. Im on the computer right now, the way I loaded firefox was i open the task mang. and started it from there also the same way i open system resstore. Does anyone know why its doing this? How can I fix it? Thanks In advance.

Jack

 

If you logon as Administrator in Safe Mode does it still do this?

 

When you open the task manager, is explorer.exe present as a process? (Also check to see if any processes are hogging system resources)

If not, you can run it manually (C:\Windows\explorer.exe). That should get you your start menu and desktop.

Once that is done, open msconfig (from start > run) and uncheck all your startup programs. Reboot and see if the problem is gone. If that does fix it, then enter msconfig again and re-check one of the startup items, reboot and repeat until the problem recurs.

If explorer.exe crashes when you try to start it manually, or you get the same problem with no startup items, then some thing more serious than a three stooges startup is going on.