Windows Vista Desktop and tool bar gone!

I turned on my laptop today to find that my desktop icons flashed up, then dissapeared. The screen has my background and the right hand clock and calender, but there seems to be now way of accessing my programs, documents or internet. I pretty much **** at working with computers, but if anyone has any advice that could save me a small fortune at the computer shop, that'd be much appreciated.
Thanks

 

Here's the fix I found that several said worked for them. Do each step, don't get in a hurry, double check along the way. If you get lost, scroll back up to the top of the left-hand pane, click once on Computer to select it and close the Registry Editor. Then reopen it (steps 1 and 2) and start again:

1. Go to Start>Run
2. Type "regedit" (without the quotes)
3. Click OK (this opens the Registry Editor)
4. Expand: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion by clicking on the tiny right-point arrowhead to the left of each
5. In the list under Windows, scroll down to Winlogon and click on it once
6. In the list that appears in the right-hand pane, find the word Shell and double click it
7. In the small window that opens, if anything other than "explorer.exe" is in the Value Data field, delete it and type "explorer.exe" (without the quotes)
8. Click OK
9. Close the Registry Editor
10. Reboot

 

Hooray!

My laptop is running normally again, *phew*.
Thanks!

ally

 

You're welcome! Thank you for posting back with the update.