I ran Norton Anti-Virus and it didn't find anything.

It's possibly a virus that has outsmarted your antivirus software, or accidental changing of system settings.there is a setting from right clicking on the desktop that hides your icons, the taskbar could be hidden on any of the 4 sides or maybe gone. Try hitting the Windows button on your keyboard & see if the start menu comes up. If so you can access everything.

I have EXACTLY the same probelm. I was getting ready to shut down WIN XP (SP1) and the desktop gave jerk and then everything on the Desktop disappeared. All that is left is the background picture. Right clicking doesn't work as the mouse won't respnd when right clicking on the Desktop. I have tried System Restore (from Task Manager), no good. I tried System Repair from CD and it claims it can't see a hard drive. If the computer will boot and I can see everything from Task Manager obviously there is a hard drive. I heard that there maybe a problem with a bad user profile. I have Norton (updated) and a spyware program running all the time and checked the computer last week for spyware. Got any ideas?

I'd try uninstalling Norton & go to www.free-av.com & download the free antivirus & see what it finds. if you have to create another user to get things working right, that is fine.

if you are getting this issue,and have sbcglobal software,try going into task manager,and go file>new task>msconfig>and uncheck ipmon32 in start up,if that fails to work,system restore.

wow, impressive man. I had this problem recently when installed sbcyahoo software to check my friend's dsl modem with my laptop. When I got home and booted my laptop again it was giving me the BSOD. I was trying to check BIOS, drivers, etc in SAFE mode but nothing untill I found your solution.
Excellent, thank you very much. Disabling those things you mentioned made my laptop come to life again.

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my friend had a problem where he couldn't see the task bar he thought it had something to do the with windows media player in tha little taskbar so he removed WMP and it fixed it

I too was having the problem of my icons and task bar not showing up. When starting up I would see the icons and task bar for only a few moments, while I saw them I quickly hit my Mozilla Firefox quick link in the taskbar and the program was still able to run although everything on the desktop disappeared. I googled my problem and I eventually came to your message and tried the Avira antivirus that your link went to and it found about 10 different trojan horses. After using the Avira, the icons and taskbar came back to life after a reboot. I then updated my Spybot S&D and it cleared out a multitude of registry keys and viruses including some of the trojans the Avira found. Do you suggest anything better to use than Spybot S&D to actually remove the viruses? It doesn't seem like delete function on the prompts that Avira brings up actually removed any of the viruses, that it just puts them on pause.