Task Bar & Start Up Menu Empty

I have been having this problem frequently lately. My task bar goes blank. The Start Up button disappears & there is just a n empty hole in the task bar on the bottom of my desktop & the time disappears & all my program icons in the system tray. I have to wind up rebooting each time. Can anyone sugggest what might be causing this ?

Specs ... Home Built

Win2000professionl - OS
30 GB HD
1024 DDR RAM
1.3 Athlon CPU

Never overclocked & over 53% of HD is availlable

 

Hi SneakyWeasel and welcome.

Nothing specific jumps out at me for this one but some general fix-up things that are easy enough to try and might help. If not, post back.

- check your event logs to see if errors or warnings look related. If you see any, open the event, click on the icon below the up/down arrows (copies event to clipboard) and paste the results here. It might give us a good starting place.

- Download, update, and run first Ad-aware and then Spybot to get rid of any spyware/malware. Some of it can do some strange things. Links in my signature.

- start~run~sfc /scannow to search for and fix any damaged system files.

Also, is there any pattern to this? After being up a long time? While using a specicif app? Anything?