Hello all hopefully someone out there can help me, I have a friends pc at home that is giving all sorts of problems, The pc was running slow and giving them the occasional BSOD, I suspected malware, spyware, viruses etc, after a lot of swearing and threats of turning the pc into a flowerbox I finally managed to install and run ad-aware SE personal, spybot and nod32 antivirus software, all programs found and removed various nasties, now the pc boots fine into safe mode or normal mode but--- once up and running there is no desktop icons, no start button nothing but the wallpaper and mouse pointer (which works fine). this is in safe mode and normal mode, Ctrl, Alt, Delete brings up the task manager in both modes but explorer.exe will not run, windows update will not update but all virus and anti spyware programs will download latest updates in both safe and normal modes, I have access to the net through another pc and can download and transfer programs via a thumb drive as I can still access this through task manager. hope I have added enough info to start with and look forward to many replies with a possible solution.