lost desktop

[lbrown]

Hi
I have a system that is about 5 years old with winXP. I turned it off and restarted it today and when it restarted I had no desktop on the screen just the background, no icons and no task bar.
I was able to get the task manager up to shut it down and it doesn't shut off, just gets to where it says windows is shutting down and stays at that.

Hit the button to restart after a while and tried safe mode, won't go in, just restarts. I put the XP disc in and got it to go back to normal but when I tried to restart without the disk, its back to where we started.
Something had turned off system restore so I don't have that to go back to.
Is there something like the old sfc or a way to reinstall xp? I tried to re install but it say its an older version and stops
Any ideas?
L Brown

[Bill]

I would start by scanning with anti virus programs like AVG Free edition and Spybot Search and Destroy. 

Bill

[Mark H]

You might also want to check your RAM with memtest, which boot up with and run from a floppy. It can be downloaded from our dowloads page.

Mark H