Desktop Background Picture Shows But No Icons and/or Start Menu Shows up? No Problem!

Blank screen with only background picture when you log into Windows? Tell me about it, It happens to the best of us sometimes, however you may be surprised at just how easy this Problem is to fix!

To put it simply heres what is probably the problem: you have a corrupted, moved, and or missing explorer.exe, the powerhouse behind graphicly browsing your computer AND DISPLAYING YOUR DESKTOP AND START MENU.  Uh-oh, time to break out the Windows CD and cut your losses with a clean reinstall?  I most definitely think not! I told you that this problem would be easy to solve and I am sticking by it. Heres the fixes in the order that they should be performed:

1: Try opening Windows Task manager.  Do this by pressing Control+ALT+Del.  If this does not work then skip to method 2, or follow my guide to fixing your task manager problem (article soon to come).  If it opens up then click on the new task button and type in "explorer.exe" (without quotes of course).  If this restores your desktop then your good to go!  Have fun, and thanks for reading.  However if this does not work tbut your task manager worked then start a new task called cmd.exe and go to step 3 (skip 2, thats for people who have no task manager).

2:  Restart windows in Safe Mode With Command Prompt. If you do not know how to do that then heres a guide: http://www.bukisa.com/articles/35097_how-to-restart-windows-in-safe-mode

3: If you've gotten to here then I have some bad news: your explorer.exe has been damaged, moved or deleted, not simply turned off.  The good news is that you can still fix it easily!  heres what you've got to do.  In Command prompt (which you should have open) type this command exactly:

cd %systemroot%\i386

It should take you to that folder, and once you are there type in:

expand explorer.ex_ %systemroot%\explorer.exe

Voila! You have replaced your explorer.exe with a (hopefully) healthy one!

To run it simply type:

start %systemroot% explorer

And your problem is fixed!  You're a computer expert!

If your task manager did not work, you may want to fix that though by following the instructions in my guide (soon to come).  This problem could have been caused by many things, but it is likely that it was caused by malware so you will want to check for malware on your PC.  I tell how to do this in my article here (article soon to come)