My son was online and when he went to shutdown noticed a new 'spam' shortcut had appeared on the Desktop.Right click on shortcut, click Properties. Went to the actual file folder in My Computer and deleted it....yes the whole folder! He thinks the path was something like C:\Program Files\Internet or C:\Program Files\Windows\Internet. Either way, the Internet folder was deleted and then removed from the Recycle Bin. Next time the CPU was started it failed to get to the Windows desktop screen. This is what happens: Start button, Microsoft Windows98 opening screen appears, screen goes black, Grisoft AVG boot-up scanner runs and shows Status Summary (all OK), full screen Flying window appears, screen blanks to blue apart from small animated flying window icon and mouse pointer in centre of screen. Windows start-up WAV sound comes and goes, PC-cillin2000 Anti-virus Real Time Scan banner appears on blank blue screen, and it just sits there! Usually this is followed by all the desktop icons and the 'Please Wait' message. No error messages appear, nothing else happens even if you leave running for half an hour or so. Ctrl-Alt-Delete shows 3 items:-Pcciomon, Mdm and Avgserv9, all with no messages in the box. HELP. What do I do now?

may hit f1,f2,f5 or f8 or del(whatever) when booting and start in safe mode and scan for virus again. or...boot normal. click start, run, and type, msconfig, uncheck everything under startup tab except antivirus, scanreg, systray, rundl,explorer, then restart. then see if anything "rechecked" itself there again. see if anything suspicous there too. download, intstall, update and scan with spybot1.3 and adaware6 from www.download.com here's another free virus scan... http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Thanks for the suggestions however there is NO desktop for me to access....if I try to start up in Safe Mode I end up with a blue screen with SafeMode written in the 4 corners and nothing else. I did a Scandisk from the DOS prompt and it came back with the following: Problem Found "The size of the C:\WINDOWS\INTERN~1\TVDEBUG.LOG file is being misreported", so I allowed the system to correct it. I also tried a SCANREG/RESTORE but the system was unable to complete the task (sorry I cannot remember the exact statement that came back) and after a bit of research came to the comclusion that maybe the hard disk is full, therefore deleted some of my old software (kids games, etc) again from the DOS prompt. Anybody know how to recover the desktop or at the very least protect the files in My Documents prior to re-formatting the hard drive? Or, is there a method of checking for the existence of the missing files (c:\windows\internet) and re-installing a patch from the CD-ROM's? Any assistance gratefully received.