Desktop/taskbar major probs

Help would be really appreciated!

Desktop looks Ok, even after reboot. Suddenly, though, I could not drag and move icons. Then when I tried to open a jpeg for viewing by double-clicking, I got an error message 'you don't have permission' etc.

I rebooted, but then my bottom taskbar icons were missing (though the desktop still looked the same). I was able to open and run aol and comodo firewall (recently installed instead of Zonealarm). Also opened ccleaner and ran registry check. No major issues.

Running XP sp2, but do not have the cd as I got this pc 2nd hand. Since discovered it's not a legal copy of windows.

Running spybot now. Is there anything else I can do?

thanks

Andy

 

View attachment 98645

you may have locked the task bar and hid the task bar icons (I do say may) try this first and see if they come back. Same fo the desktop icons (second attachment) Someone else will be along to help you with the permission problem

 

Thanks for that, but when I click on the link for the attachment, I get a message 'invalid attachment ,

 

I've got it....sorry. Just enlarged the pic.

 

The task bar was indeed locked. This still didn't fix everything, so I've done a system restore via msconfig, back 24hrs. Was this the right thing to do? I'd still like to know what happened. Pretty worrying!

I'd only very recently gone through most of the xp cleanup, stopping just before combofix

cheers

 

sorry this was the other attachment. this one shows how the desktop items can also be locked or unlocked. but I guess since the restore worked your problems are solved? If not post back.

 

Seems to be ok now, thanks Buggabear. All the best!