Hi, Small world indeed, I noticed similar posts in this forum, so I tried to resolve the issues by following some of the instructions but I am at loss here. I have winxp and the last time my windows was working properly I deleted some old files (I am pretty sure this is the reason why my windows is screwed up now) and changed my background. Now today when I started it up it was working fine till it reached the desktop which of course was completely empty, meaning it had no taskbar, no startmenu and no icons. It still had the background but thats least of my worries now. I can still access my files by ctrl+alt+deleting and then clicking file-newtask(run..) from taskbar, and the files seems to work just fine, infact I am posting this msg from the same computer. I noticed explorer.exe is not running in the process menu, but when i do try to run it by clicking file-newtask(run) only my documents window shows up with explorer sidebar open, this doesn't solve any of my problem btw. Now I don't know why internet explorer would have anything to do with this, but still here's my internet explorer version number- 6.0.2600.0000.xpclnt_qfe.021108-2107 (since I noticed someone asked for the version number to solve one of the similar problems) I also have no shdoc401.dll in my system folder. If shdoc401.dll is the problem (which btw I don't know if it is), can someone please email it to me at the following address- nwnrocks2001@yahoo.com. Any help would be much appreciated.

some more info : the right click of my mouse is disabled when i am on desktop, however it works fine when it's inside a folder or internet explorer.

I am no expert, but the only thing that comes to mind is that in Windows Explorer, Right click the Recycle Bin folder, then click Open, then click "Restore all items".

Try to access your taskbar. Right click on properties, then start menu. Check whichever box is not checked under start menu. I did this and it restored all my icons. Hope you can access taskbar so you can right click. I just went to the bottom of the screen and right clicked where it was suppose to be. You might have to access it through a folder if right click doesn't work. Good luck.