XP Problems after update

Hi all,

My computer has been going down hill and with school around the corner I need to get it in good operating order soon.

Symptoms:

IE crashes: Any time I bring IE up it will maybe work for 1 minute and then crash, and even sometimes crashes immediately after it launches. No error message or anything. It just closes out every time I bring it up. (I tend to use Firefox so no big loss, but other family members are complaining.)

Background problems: Anytime I right click a picture and click 'Set as Background' it doesn't change over to the new picture. But if I reboot the computer that picture will finally show up.

Task Pane Bare: When hitting CTL+ALT+DEL the task pane is now bare where there use to be tabs. All it will show is what programs I currently have running. It doesn't have any of the other tabs and it doesn't have a close out X button anymore. I have to hit ESC to exit out of the window. My computer has seemed to slow down a bit, but I can't see my resource uses to see what's up and with what program.

Restore Points Missing: Because of all these problems I figured I'd try to restore to a previous point, back when the comp wasn't acting funny, but the only restore points I have are those in August and all this started around in July. All the ones I had before it are missing. They just disappeared.

More Info: This all seemed to start happening after a Windows update was installed last month. I haven't installed any new software or hardware during this time.

So here's my question: Is this due to the update and should I try just reinstalling the windows program. Or should I be more drastic and just go ahead and reformat the disk and then install windows again. Or is this possibly a adware/malware/spyware problem? I've scanned with two different adware programs and have done a virus scan and have come up with nothing that would do this.

Just not sure what would be the best course of action.

 

Thank you so much PeteC. Your time to answer my post is most appreciated.

My Task Manager problem is now solved.

I haven't messed with my IE yet. I didn't download any add-ons since I don't mess with IE that much. I think I'm just gonna try redownloading IE7 and see if that fixes whatever problem that was.

As for the restoring points, I really believe I had adjusted the settings to hold more the last time I reformatted and reinstalled windows, but when I went to go check the setting, it didn't seem that was the case. That was almost 2 years ago so maybe my memory is just faulty, and I just thought I did.

My background still won't change for some reason, and I've tried refreshing by both F5 and by right clicking the desktop and neither one works. I'm gonna try a repair install and see if that clears up the extra issues.

Again, thank you so much for your help and the complement.