I'm sorry if this is the wrong place for this, i seemed right.

I am having an odd problem on my laptop.

Here is exactly what just happened;

Switched on laptop, loaded windows but then it just hung...it displayed the wallpaper image but nothing atall loaded, no timer on the curser.

I restarted, and a message popped up telling me that explorer could not load as WININET.DLL was missing. I managed to run firefox through task manager, googled the file and downloaded it...the readme file in the zip instructed me to extract it to windows/system which I did.

I restarted again, and after it ran a disk check, my desktop seemed to load correctly. Happy days!

But now it is flashing on and off. It will show the desktop and all my shortcuts for about 3 seconds, then go back to nothing but the wallpaper for 3 seconds, and so on and so on.

I am currently running a virus scan, but what on earth could this be?

Please help

Fixed....I had either downloaded a dodgy version of WININET.DLL or put it in the wrong place....thing is, all the googling I did suggested the flashing desktop was down to malware..so after spending hours trying to run either system restore, regcure, and various other scans to try and fix it, then having to restart the laptop cos it was freezing, almost putting my fist through the screen in frustration and shouting needlessly at my poor cat...I found an article that suggested I rename the wininet.dll and then copy a fresh version into system32 from i386. I did that, and hey presto!

I'm so relieved!!

This may serve as a warning to anyone else who experiences this problem, dont mess with ya DLL's until you have thoroughly researched the issue lol. I guess I'll know for next time!