desktop icons and taskbar menu disappear...new twist

[totallyawsum]

i've had a problem with my desktop icons and taskbar completely disappearing....this started shortly after installing pirates of the caribbean online. i've since uninstalled it, and still i can only access programs thru task manager using ctrl/alt/delete. well after reading other solutions and downloading antivirus and antispy programs and temporarily solving it, the problem still continues. i did my due diligence researching other answers to the problem...i ended up starting msconfig from the task manager and stopping programs in the startup and boot.ini that looked suspicious including start.ini changes and voila! everything came back, then went away, then came back, then went away. so now i have the same problem but cycling every five seconds. how about someone telling me which boot and startup and start programs are absolutly necessary and giving me an idea why it would be cycling or what program may have attached itself to something on my computer to cause the cycling or what it could attach to that might cause it. i'm baffled and no answer seems to exist that doesn't involve restore or ddm folder or some other things frequently mentioned. the first time it seemed to be solved was shortly after running an antivirus the found a trojan then later a trojan downloader, then the problem reappeared again.

[qfisheye]

have you tried restoring to a previous tims, before you started having the problem? Good luck Lenny