Explorer will not load

[holyrosarych]

Good afternoon! I ran a Windows Update, (when prompted) yesterday, and my computer started having troubles, i.e., documents crashed, (but recovered), and I system locked up. When I rebooted, all the icons and start button and bar were missing from my desktop. When I went through task manager, I was able to access icons I had on my desktop and different programs, Word, Publisher, etc., however, whenever I typed in explorer, nothing happened. The system restore will not open because explorer will not open.

Can anyone help?

Thanks