Desktop icons, taskbar missing.....

[angel555555]

Hi

Just wondered if anyone could help please?

My friend's daughter downloaded the dreaded lop and a couple of other things to her computer, she's running Windows XP Pro. Well I managed to remove the lop and the other spyware (using spybot and Adaware) but unfortunately it removed the desktop and taskbar in the process and we can no longer access my computer, my documents, add/remove programs etc.

Other programs can be accessed using the taskmanager and much of the rest of the OS is in intact as far as I can see.

I tried to reinstall XP from the cd rom but it kept telling me that the installation on the computer was newer than that on the cd rom. The computer won't let me boot up from the cd rom or from floppy disks despite changing the settings of the bios. I can't install from the command prompt either. Have even tried installing from a Windows 98 disk and a Windows ME disk (both of which have been on this computer) but both say they want me to boot up in ms-dos and you can't restart Windows XP in dos mode.

I removed the SP2 update to see if that would work, well it got me through to the setup but now it's saying "setup cannot upgrade your current installation to Windows XP. Your current installation is not a supported upgrade path"

Since I cannot reboot from the cd rom or the floppys, I don't really want to format the hard drive unless absolutely neccessary and I've never done that before so am a bit worried of messing up the computer more than it already is.

Any suggestions? XP is running on the NTFS file system so I know I can't uninstall it, but then, even if I could, I can't access add/remove programs to do so.

Thanks

[spanna]

If you can boot into xp start up the computer

when xp has loaded press the windows key (down by the spacebar with the MS logo) and the letter r together

this should bring up the run prompt

type in "sfc /runnow"

(without "")

this should scan your windows files looking for errors -- you will probably need the installation cd handy

[angel555555]

Thank you for that, I did as you said and actually got the set up working, however, have another problem....

Installation stops with 34 minutes to go. I know there's enough memory because Windows XP has been working already on there and I've cleaned the disk so it's not a problem with any fingerprints or anything on it.

This is driving me nuts lol

Thank you again for your help, I'm going to have to leave it for the week since I'm going away on vacation tomorrow until July 6th, but I would appreciate anymore suggestions you may have.