Crashed,now won't load up

[Zeppelin]

System- P4 2.0,512 ram
Win XP
Norton firewall and anti virus..if thats relevant

I had a blue screen crash and now windows does not seem to fully load up. On first restart it possibly ? flashed up something about registry..? to quick so not sure

Now win xp starts but when it gets to the desktop screen where my desktop icons and the start bar normally are, its all blank!

Pressing ctrl-alt-del gets me to task manager but can't get much to run from there, however double clicking on aol and i can get onto the internet...voila

Tried to get into system restore but again just a blank page

So wheres everything gone??
Would appreciate any advice or help
Thanks

[The Sweeney]

Have you changed the screen resolution? If so, set it to 800x600...

Can you right click, select Arrange Icons, Auto Arrange...

[BlueEagle]

I had something similar with XP, 'phoned MS Support and they said, re-boot from the CD-Rom, look for the option, 'Replace and Repair' and select that. System decided to do a complete reinstall anyway, after which it did a very thorough scan and said it had replaced some corrupted groups, eventually got back to normal but had to go to MS Update and reload/install all the updates.

[Zeppelin]

Thanks, but resolution is ok
Right/left clicking does nothing.
Just seems strange the bar at the bottom with 'start' and the start up tray have totally disappeared along with all desktop shortcut icons?

BlueEagle, unfortunately my comp only came with a recovary disk,desparately trying to avoid wiping everything off....again!!

[Scallywag]

Hi Zeppelin

I'm not on the xp machine at the moment, so I don't know if you can do this but you can on older os. Boot up in DOS mode, then in directory where os is (assuming C) type

C:\scanreg/restore (yes it is a backslash followed by forward slash) You will then be presented with a list of dates when registry was ok, assuming you have a corrupted registry. Click on the date you wish registry to go back to. As I say I don't know if this function is available on xp or whether you're just stuck with system restore ?