Stupid computer...

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

The bar at the bottom of my screen keeps disappearing! You know, the one that shows what programs are open?

It tends to happen when I open a program. Like just now it happened as I got into a chat on MSN and opened Serebii at the same time, although it happens on all sorts of pages (including this one).

It used to happen just for a few seconds, but now it's not coming back at all.

Any advice? It also takes away all icons on my desktop, so I have to turn the computer off manually by pushing the power button.

 

[Beautiful Day]

Have you tried bringing up the task manager with CTR-ALT-Delete (if you use Windows)? If so, does it list explorer.exe as a running program?

 

[Rayne]

I'm sure I've seen this problem before. What it may most likely be is a program
or running task that has something to do with manipulating your desktop.

Any program that shares desktop space enviornment may forcefully remove
the icons and startbar in order to run. But completely away? I'm not so sure
why it would do this constantly. Do you use any programs that do something
like this? For example when I play things like Age of Empires, a DVD program,
or if I have my TV tuner in operation, one or two icons get juggled around
no matter how often I place them where I want.

I guess the best thing to do first would be to check and see what processes
you have running [Alt+Ctrl+Del then processes]. Check the ones under your
username for anything suspicious. I wouldn't tamper with turning off System
processes as they could really screw with your computer.

edit: and as Beautiful Day mentioned, having explorer.exe active and not corrupt may be a good thing ^_^;;

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

Thing is, when I actually *do* manage to get ctrl-alt-del to work, there's several programs running with similar names--primarily explorer.exe and iexplorer.exe. Which one is the real one?

And when Explorer crashes and it sends an error message, it says something called Dr Watson Post-Mortem Debugger also crashes. I never loaded that onto my computer, what is it?

 

[Fig]

Dr Watson, IIRC, is an anti-virus.

Explorer.exe is, essentialy, the Windows environment program.
Iexplorer.exe is (obviously), Internet Explorer.

Explorer.exe is the one you need to keep an eye on.

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

Environment program? What does that mean?

 

[Rayne]

Basically every time you run windows, it uses explorer.exe to boot everything
you see on your desktop. Without it, no working desktop.

I usually try to avoid third party anti-virus software as they tend to be more
sketchy and you never know how they interact with windows.

If you can ctrl-alt-del, find it and stop it's process after you're logged in
that 'may' solve your issue if you really suspect it to be faulty [as you
weren't aware that you even had it].

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

I just did that, and Dr Watson was nowhere to be found.

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

all right, now my AVG is telling me that I have a virus called Klone in some files called bbkgyipr.dll and jxewwjmq.dll. Anyone know how I can get rid of these?