Windows XP Not booting and not taskbar or icons??

I have a friend whos computer when booted up gets to his icon to log in, goes past that, displays his wallpaper....and thats it! No icons, no task bar nowt!

If you ctrl+alt+del you get task manager and things can be run from the file run menu. There are 25 processess running, Nortons are a few but they can't be stopped. CPU usage is only 2%.

Spybot hung when it was fixing things it found(only comet cursor items so he said), Ad-aware won't install it shows a "not responding" message. The latest stinger from McAfee didn't find anything at all.

I have suggested a sfc /scannow.

Any ideas?

Sounds like a virus to me, machine is also very very slow and its a 2400 I believe and only months old.

Thanks

 

It sounds like explorer is not starting. From task manager click New Task and type in "explorer.exe ". See if this finishes the boot process.
Have you tried Safe Mode? I have found that sometimes if I can boot into safe mode, this problem will fix itself.

Also, check out this page
http://uk.trendmicro-europe.com/enterprise/security_info/ve_detail.php?VName=WORM_MYDOOM.B

 

Hi
Nope Explorer does nothing and safe mode is a black screen with 'safe mode' in each corner of the screen.

Interesting link...will give that a look tomorrow as well...does sound like whats happening..thanks for that one.

Any other ideas?

 

Not offhand. I have experienced these same symptoms and if those two solutions didn't work, I usually Ghost my PC (I always keep my data files on a non-system drive so I can ghost easily). You know about Symantec Ghost? Great program. Heartily recommended!
The link was something I found just before replying to your post, so I've never really tried what it says. But it looked good and I've saved the page for my own future use. Please let me know if it solves your prob.

 

Turns out the friend had installed McAfees firewall along side Nortons and this had caused Windoews to become corrupt. sfc /scannow didn't fix anything so a reinstall of XP did. It replaced the corrupt files and left the programs behind.

Surfice to say....Nortons has been removed and a replacement is being sought

Thanks for your help

 

Yep. Two firewalls just don't work. Thanks for letting me know.