Explorer.exe won't open

PC boots up to desktop, but explorer.exe doesn't open. There is a curser, and a blank desktop, but no Start Menu, taskbar or desktop icons.

The thing that makes this most difficult, is that this is a laptop that no matter what I do or how I change the BIOS settings, will not boot from CD. Otherwise I'd just do a Repair Install.

What I've done so far is, removed the hard drive and placed it in a USB housing and connected it to another PC and scanned the drive with AVG and Spybot. I also ran a chkdsk.

I put the drive back in the laptop, and it still boots but won't open explorer.exe. I can call up any program with Task Manager (except for explorer.exe of course).

So what should I do? I have my XP CD in the drive, and can run it using Task Manager, but I don't assume I can do a repair install or access the Recovery Console without booting from the CD?


Thanks!