Windows explorer error

Hello there. I am having a very...very troubling error. Just about an hour ago, I was enjoying a game, which I was pulled out of by an error message, announcing to me that windows explorer had suffered a critical error and needed to shut down. This had happened before, and was usually solved with a restart, but as my tool bar, including START, had vanished, this was not an option.

Everything seemed to still be working, my game, msn, AIM ect. But I rebooted via the button on the tower. When turned the computer back on however, windows started as normal until it reached my desktop. Nothing was there except the background. I could pull nothing up, and I was unable to bring up task manager with cntrl+alt+delete. The only thing that worked was my screensaver...woowee. I have tried to reboot it several times, though I've had to flip the big switch each time after that, as simply pressing the power button on the tower does nothing.

Does anyone know how to fix this problem? I can not do anything on my computer right now.

Oh, my specs are 2800+ Athlon, 1024 meg ram, 160 gig harddrive, and a Radeon 9600 XT, Windows XP home edition.

 

When you reboot the machine, are you able to go into [SAFE] mode and look at the Error log in Control Panel/Administrative tools?

 

Um, I have to reboot it by hitting the power switch, so I have no options before I reboot it, nothing works.

 

Alright, update. The icons on the desktop and my tool bar still do not appear, but the rest of the computer seems to work, I even pulled up firefox and winamp, and played an MP3. This at least opens up a fair deal more options as to what I can do.