Vista ate my desktop

[Muse]

I've got Windows Vista Home Premium on a Gateway MT6728. For some reason, when I start my computer up, it'll load everything (MSN Messenger, Skype, etc.) and then the entire desktop will go blank. No shortcuts, no taskbar, nothing but the wallpaper. I can still access the task manager through CTRL+ALT+DEL and I've checked to make sure that explorer.exe is still running and it is. The weird thing is that if I start a program like Firefox or a game before it freaks out, everything works normally.

So, it's nothing completely crippling, but it's annoying to have to race my computer before it crashes. Does anyone have any ideas? ; - ;

 

[___]

First guess would be you have a virus and the explorer.exe you see running is a dummy.  After you reach the point that the virus loads, it's killing the real explorer.exe and running a viral version, thus your issue.

 

[Muse]

Any solutions for that? I've got AVG, so I'll do a scan for one. Is it possible that if there was a dummy explorer, I could find its .exe file through a manual search and just delete it? Backing up my computer beforehand, of course. ^^'

 

[Toams]

You can't just kill the (perhaps fake) explorer.exe and start it again?
Then you're sure it's a virus.

 

[Tdata]

Is dwm.exe running?

 

[Musashi]

You can try restarting explorer.exe, that fixes the problem sometimes. (Sometimes what happens to you randomly occurs on my computer.)

 

[mega_man_aXe]

You can try restarting explorer.exe, that fixes the problem sometimes. (Sometimes what happens to you randomly occurs on my computer.)

Same here, fixed mine right up.

 

[___]

Yeah you can search for multiple copies of explorer.exe and attempt to delete any fake ones; in Windows XP it should be located in C:\Windows\ but I'm not sure about Vista, tbh I'm not very experienced with it because I think it's a giant shit of an OS.

 

[Muse]

You can try restarting explorer.exe, that fixes the problem sometimes. (Sometimes what happens to you randomly occurs on my computer.)

Same here, fixed mine right up.

I think it worked! I cleaned up some files (There were a couple of duplicate explorer.exe files in C:\Windows...Hmm...), ran some scans, and restarted my computer and it hasn't done the no-desktop thing again. Thanks for the help! ^_^

 

[alexanderpas]

fun (semi-related) fact: did you know that windows sometimes draws the I (i) and the l (L) and the | (pipe) exactly the same!

the thing you described might also happen when explorer crashes when it is refreshing your screen

 

[___]

@alex: That's a font issue, change your system fonts in your themes to one that differentiates between the three suitably.