About a week ago i came to my computer, and it had restarted by itself. When I looked at the monitor there was no desktop or tastbar. I can't right click on the desktop, and cant bring up the taskbar. I have Norton 2003 Professional and I've repeatedly updated it and ran scans and I have no viruses. I can run programs throught the task manager, and no files that I can tell are missing. Accually I'm using my computer. I dont want to reformat the computer because I have lots of important business files on here. I hope there is an easier way or someone who has had the same problem before

see if ctrl + alt + del opens up the task manager. if it does, check on the processes and see whats running. there's a piece of spyware that causes this you see, think it's called syso.exe or something similar. if that fails, try safe mode, and run a system restore.

Assume you've run you AV scan and everything is updated. You may have a virus or trojan or worm or adware or some other sort of malware. Run an AV scan, and download AdAware and Spybot, install them, update them, and run. Delete anything that looks suspicious. Some advise deleting everything because it's all reversible. Also get Spyblaster which keeps a list of bad stuff on your computer and blocks them from being installed (theoretically). Be sure your independent (not MS’s) firewall is enabled. Spybot AdAware

Kevin, Check out the link below for a possible solution. Taskbar Is Missing When You Log On to Windows Tufenuf

I have found what the whole problem was. I went through my process list and ended SYSU.exe and the desktop re-appeared. I searched the file on google and I found a site that has instructions on how to remove the virus. This seems to be very new, because the AV programs havn't found this yet. anyways thank you everyone who has helped me correct this error. the website is http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:ChW3kAaMVj4J:geekatwork.blogspot.com/+sysu.exe&hl=en&ie=UTF-8