I have the same problem. No desktop, no right-click, but everything accessible through task manager.
What I did was I made myself a shortcut of explorer.exe (from C:\ WINDOWS), placed it on my desktop, and gave it a shortcut key (Ctrl+Alt+E for me) so every time the desktop disappears, I just press the shortcut and everything will come back again. I was able to get through the day without the desktop disappearing.
Hope this helps anyone...
