Desktop vanished

I foolishly downloaded and installed a codec that official looking alerts told me that I needed. Instead I got an immediate blue screen followed by an incredibly vexing problem

My desktop is gone. Windows will boot up (a bit slowly) but there are no icon, not task bar, no Start button. Nothng but background jpg and the cursor. This occurs even when I boot in safe mode. I can only get the task manager to come up and it shows several processes running that I've never seen before "Askupdade" and some thing called just "b" that is ususally using all or almost all of the cpu processing power.

In addition when I try to shut down there is a program called "A" that I have to manually close before it will allow me to do so but this event only seems to occur in regular mode, not in Safe Mode

There doesn't seem to be much I can do as I have no access at all from Windows except for the limited functions of the task manager. I'm not even sure if this is a virus and if somehow Windows has gotten corrupted. I am using Windows Xp Home Edition.

Thank you.

 

Welcome to MajorGeeks!

Try this please.

Open Task Manager and go to File > New Task (Run...)
Type in explorer.exe then click OK.

If the desktop appears then try following the instructions below and get us all of the logs that you can.

Attach the requested logs when you finish these instructions.

READ & RUN ME FIRST. Malware Removal Guide