Missing desktop icons, taskbar and start button

Hi

Yesterday i completed the final steps in the malware removal under the guidance of chaslang.

This morning when i started my pc, my desktop icons, taskbar and start button were missing leaving me with just my desktop wallpaper (nice pic of my kids but right now i want my bits back)

Here is the link to my malware issues and fixes just in case it may be of help in determining the cause:

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=164908

What have i done and what do I know at this moment:

I have informed chaslang as i was unsure if this is a malware or soft/hardware problem.

He has suggested that i post in software however, when i did a search on related problems I seemed to get more previous posts from here and malware, hence my post in hardware.

During my research the MS website said that it was a simple matter of opening task manager and under the processes tab type explorer.exe in the box and watch as my items returned. However they did not!!

For some reason that is beyond me, when I F8 at start up, my pc does not open into anything which gives me an option to start in safe mode. I get a boot page > see below:

BOOT
Select a Boot first device
Removable
- Floppy Disk
Hard Disk
- SATA3 :ST 3250410AS
CDROM
- 1st Master Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-112

I can get into safe mode by accessing msconfig via my task manager and when i start in safe mode my desktop items reappear, with the following exceptions:

I have two option Admin account and Owner account.

Under my owner acc. my icons are all there and where I had placed them.
Under my Admin acc. only about 70 - 80% of the icons are there and in a different position to how i had them.

Under normal start I get the welcome screen for about 20 seconds and then my desktop loads minus everything.

I did run some scans today and they are showing some abnormalities although Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and Spyware Terminator came up clean. I can't upload the logs again as they are already in the above thread link

As part of the final steps in the malware removal I did set a new restore point but restore is not working as it should and i dont know why.

If anyone can help, it would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

My head is starting hurt from banging it on the desk too much :confused

Regards

Bodybag

 

Hi all,

Having recently resolved this problem with many thanks to chaslang over in Malware. I just wanted to share the cause of my problem for educational purposes seeing as quite a few people took a look at this post.

It turns out that there was some kind of software conflict with one or more of the software items that i downloaded to protect my system in the future.

Deleted Online Armor 2 (Firewall) which did seem to fix the problem but then I had some other issues not related to the original problem, so followed up with deleting Avast AntiVirus.

Of course this is not to say that there is an actual problem with the above mentioned software but only when they were installed on my system.

All is good once again

cheers bodybag