I have win XP home, with all the updates and svc packs up to date. I've run Spybot and Ad-Aware several times already. The problem started when I was playing Battlefield 1942. I left it playing for about an hour unattended because I had visitors come over. When I came back, the game had minimized and the desktop was showing, and the game music was constantly skipping. I couldn't do anything in windows, and I tried to go back to the game, but the screen just went black, so finally I turned the power off. Now everytime I turn on the computer, the CPU usage goes crazy going up and down between about 20-90%. Whenever I start Windows, only some of my icons work, the rest are placeholder graphics, and if I try and start a program it loads really slowly. If I try to restart the computer, I get an error message that explorer.exe encountered a problem and needs to shut down. Then of course the computer hangs and doesn't shut down, and I have to turn off the power. Occasionally it will shut down normally, but nothing I can figure out will fix this. Oh, and I did the system restore and rolled my computer back about a month, and still have the same problems. I would appreciate ANY help!

EDIT:Upon further investigation, this problem only lasts about 6-7 min. after Windows loads. Then it runs normally, however this has never happened before and, previously, once the computer started , it didn't take it 6-7 min to calm down. In my task manager the three processes that seem irregular are System (very erratic mem usage), System idle process (not quite as eratic), and one of the 3 svchost.exe's that I have running (erratic mem usage, then hovers around 15,500 K).

Hope this helps!

I had a problem where, when I started my computer, the desktop icons and taskbar would disappear and reappear frequently. After a lot of trials and errors, I managed to fix this problem. Here's how I did it in this article: How to Fix EXPLORER.EXE problem.
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