DescentBB

Ran Virus scans in safe mode and it found 2 trojans and deleted them.

Still when I boot to windows normal mode the desktop does not load nor the icons. I have tried ctr+alt+del and loading explorer.exe, but nada.

I haven't had the time to look at this more, its a machine at work. Where is it that explorer.exe is defined as the shell? I was going to check there, as well as any other ideas people had here.

Do you have to log in before loading desktop or is it direct to desktop?

Did you look at the users' profile size in safe mode to see how big it is? Also, check his profile on in the c:\\documents and settings\\username\\desktop and check to see how much stuff is on it. I've noticed the more you hae on the desktop (not shortcuts but actual files) it takes longer to load or doens't load at all.

Also, when a profile is corrupt windows makes another on the fly, with a funky name like cuda68.machine_name or something goofy like that. So the old desktop items maybe in another profile directory.

I didn't check the size in safe mode, but he didn't have a whole lot on his desktop).

It was just missing the taskbar/icons and there was no explorer process running.

Check what shell he has set in his registry. It might have been replaced with a now-nonexistent program. I forget the specific keys to check under XP.