My computer was running fine yesterday evening, although the daily AV scan did pick up an infected file in the temporary internet files folder. This morning when I turned my pc on it booted up like it always does, and got the login screen like always. After I typed my password in and press enter it said loading personal settings, then stayed there for a while. After about a minute that dissapeared and the wallpaper showed up (but no icons). It then stayed like this for a long time. I then pressed ctrl-alt-del and closed explorer then reran it. This made the icons appear, and the pc seems to run fine (except I am missing most of the tray icons - all that shows up is the volume control) What could be the problem? Im getting concerned as the pc may stop working altogethter soon and I dont want to lose my files...

i suggest you download a spyware detector, that may solve the problem, after you remove some spywares (if found). but i believe that's your problem. if windows didn't work properly, repair it, but make sure to remove any viruses or spywares before you repair. Push The Limits!!!

AVG, Spybot S&D and Adaware havent helped However, I have noticed that cdac11ba.exe is running when the pc starts (in its state of doing nothing - discovered when doing ctrl,alt,del). This was installed with a game I installed yesterday (some copy protection stuff). Could this be the problem - that program running? If so, how do I remove it?

I don't think that's your problem. Try to uninstall the whole game if you want to make sure if any new installed programs affected your pc. I had a friend that had the same problem as yours, i suggested that he should go to the recovery console (you have to run it from a bootable WINXP installation cd), and then run "chkdsk c:" (if windows is on drive C) from there and then repair your copy. That solved the problem for him. Push The Limits!!!

Right, it's all sorted now. I tried logging off then logging on again, that immediately made AVG pick up a virus - turns out that when I closed explorer and reran it AVG wasn't loaded properly. Anyway that cleaned out some exe file, and now the pc runs again properly! Cheers