icons wont work and screen goes blank...

I know there are a lot of threads about this situation but everyone seems to have the ability to get onto the net to get patches and programs to help. My problem is I can get my windows XP page up but everytime i click on a icon it goes blank and refreshes the page. Then to top it off I cant even get on the internet to get hijackthis to work... How do i manually do this ... grrr i am so lost and dont wanna take my computer in to get it fixed ....