EMPTY DESKTOP - nothing at all

[heinz57g]

now what did i do? ran SPYBOT, as i have done hundred times before, it found a few trojans
looked like the usual ones, every month.

had them all cleaned out, was not really watching.

i guess i should have: after rebooting (XPprof SP3), the computer booted into the usual
desktop picture, but nothing on it. no icons, no taskbar, no nothing. EMPTY !

nothing to click on, no right click, no left click reaction.

the strangest thing being, SPYBOT started a new scan all by itself, in a small window i had
not seen before. see the attachment. it is still running, and will be for another hour - but
again, what did i do wrong here?

greetings - heinz -

PS: and naturally, what do i do now?

[Zenobia]

If I remember this correctly,then your desktop may reappear after Spybot is done it's scan,since I think I remember the Spybot scan running before anything else loaded when I ran it on startup before.
What may have happened,was Spybot needed to run on startup to fix something,so it asked if it could run a scan on your next startup,and then did it's thing.

If your desktop was still blank after the Spybot scan was done,then it might be due to explorer.exe not starting,though.In that case,then please post back.

[heinz57g]

zenobia, love you!

thats just what must have happened.

>> your desktop may reappear after Spybot is done it's scan

did just that. and that scan was awefully slow, 1/3rd of the speed of a normal one,
taking me till 4am ... yes, i was worried.

>> Spybot scan running before anything else loaded when I ran it on startup before

what it should do, give some kind of notification or mssg upon the closing down or the
restart, so people are not sitting there as long-faced and worried as i was.

>> so it asked if it could run a scan on your next startup, and then did it's thing

no, it did not say ANYTHING, and did not even advise me to do a restart. that was
entirely my own doing, i do this often after any sort of virus inspection/cleaning.

so, hope this exchange and info helps somebody who gets into the same situation!

greetings - heinz -

[Zenobia]

Glad it all worked out ok. :)
Usually,a message pops up asking if Spybot can run on next Windows startup if needed at the end of a scan.I'm not sure why that didn't happen in your case.I'm not sure if this would be it or not,but if you like,you could open Spybot,click Mode,Advanced Mode,Settings,Settings,then make sure there is a checkmark beside Display Confirmation Dialogs before doing critical changes.