i had a balloon come up saying that my computer is at risk. i go to into control panel and open my firewall settings and it says "Do to an unidentified problem, windows cannot display Windows Firewall settings." Also, on my desktop i cannot see backgrounds but only colors, in my properties menu i can only chose colors, i can't even scroll through the different backgrounds. help would very apreciated and grateful.

Look at this link http://windowsxp.mvps.org/sharedaccess.htm You have to have xp SP2 for it to be applicable to your problem.

thank you, i fixed my fire wall. but, i still cant select a background only colors. do you know how i can fix this as well? thank you

Go to Control Panel > Display. Click on the "Desktop" tab then click the "Customize Desktop" button. Click on the "Web" tab. Under "Web Pages" remove everything excepy"MY Current Home Page". This fix is only for XP & Windows 2000 and compliments of Mosaic1. It may or may not work but is worth the try. Download and Save Cleandesktop to your computer from this link: http://www.thespykiller.co.uk/files/cleandesktop.exe and double click on the cleandesktop.exe It will automatically extract to c:\desktopclean where it needs to be to run and will automatically run the cleandesktop.vbs script If it doesn't open then go to c:\desktopclean and double click on the cleandesktop.vbs Do not run any other file from there please unless asked to If you have script blocking enabled you will get a warning about a malicious script wanting to run. Please allow this script to run. It is not malicious. If you get a message when you first run it "Can not find script file "blah blah blah" then don't worry just doubleclick the cleandesktop.vbs script again you sometimes get that message when a script blocker blocks the script It will then kill Explorer. You will lose your taskbar and desktop. It will repair the registry entries returning your normal desktop and context menu functions. It will restart Explorer. Once you have performed the big cleanup, each of the other Users on the System needs to be signed in to clean up their desktop and regain the right click. I have included another vbs to do this. It is named Other Profiles Regfix.vbs Have each User sign in and run Other Profiles Regfix.vbs Open C:\ (Go to Start>Run and type C: Press enter) and Open the c:\desktopclean folder. Double click on Other Profiles Regfix.vbs Explorer will be ended and that user's active desktop registry entries will be repaired. Explorer will be restarted. To restore the desktop to whatever picture you normally have right click on a blank part of desktop & select properties/desktop & select your prefered picture press apply & then ok to exit and then press F5 You will need to do this step for every user account