Vista themes, wallpaper, broke. How to reinstall?

I realize this has been kicked around before but there are no live threads I can find now, and no closed ones that actually had a solution.
Anyone know how to restore or reinstall the desktop personalization applet in Vista [Home Premium in this case] ???
I see, around the web, a lot of posts about the problem, and a lot of "blame the user", but so far not found a solution.

any help much appreciated since I hate Vista and try not to touch!

z

 

What happens when you right click on an empty area of the desktop? Is the Personalize option there? If so, what happens when you click it?

 

hey, thanks for helping!

works fine so far as it goes--- it all seems to function as planned, except it cannot load a bitmap/jpg as background wallpaper. a friend suggested switching Aero "off" but that did not solve the problem [and I don't really know that it is 'off', but I clcked it over to 'classic' and then changed the background color from black to light blue/gray].

here is something really really bizarre. i don't recall ever seeing such a thing.
I was combing all over trying to figure out whether i needed to uninstall combofix [never have before... didn't know it was an issue]. so, after a couple of apparently pointless and fail attempts at combofix.exe \uninstall , I did a full restart, and now the same desktop is FULL of album-art images apparently relocated from the Itunes folders!!! how on earth did that happen? I'm not sure I could write an applet that would pull that off :confused

so, still no luck. I guess there is a little line of executable code that says 'take this image file, stretch & align, fill the background' and it ain't started, or is corrupt, but the windows/vista repair process shows zero errors... nothing to repair.

?

 

couple more notes.
1. The owner/user's "My Pictures" folder is now marked as "inaccessible" !! I dunno what was in there. I don't know if that is her main stash of pictures or not. Checked permissions etc and it all looks right. But the folder is toast.

2. Other than the shocking discovery above, I've checked every setting I can find that might relate to this, and uninstalled Quicktime [some images in folders were marked as QT, but QT was not installed properly, and very old... 2007 vintage]. Still no image as desktop/background. Toggled through all destop-manager options: Aero, Vista, Windows Classic, etc. they all basically work, and even selecting a Theme seems to work [as far as i can 'see'] but in no case can succeed with an image.

HOWEVER.... as last test/afterthought, I popped open good ole quaint IE8, went to an image of Kobe Bryant smarting off during the game, right clicked and hit "save as background", and it worked. Now that is truly disturbing.
Here's another finding: does Vista not use the handy thing known as "thumbnails"??? I see no "thumbnail" option in the View settings dropdown. nada. Is that not available in "performance" mode [system/advanced] ??

So, with the Kobe picture in mind, I browse to a folder, select an image file and hit "Open With" Internet Explorer. That works, so right-click and 'BAM'... there it is as the background. But what a convoluted way to get there.

??????????????????

 

one more note, then wait on someone smarter:
I checked Default Program associations and there are quite a few filetypes left orphaned by something??? cleanup programs perhaps. probably had infectious/maliciious programs associating with them and post-cleanup need reassigning. the image files were all over the map... many associated with a trial program of something called ACDSee [any notes on that one? I prefer Infranview]. that package is not full, but in some sort of trial mode, it may have been bloatware shipped with the system or some peripheral.
Maybe that sheds some light, maybe not.