right here goes, i'm trying to help my dad in spain with a comp prob so details might be a bit rusty, he has a dell inspiron 4000 and when he loads up the system the tasbar appears for a couple of seconds and then disappears leaving only the cursor, after pressing ctrl,alt, del the only thing that shows up is mcvsrte which is the virus definition for mcafee, he has tried to do the shellfix.reg that is suggessted here :

ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/shellfix.txt

after copying the file to the startup menu and then rebooting, nothing came up still, he is currently going though some steps that we found here :

http://computing.net/windowsme/wwwbo...rum/30687.html.

if anyone else has any ideas im sure he would be greatly appreciative, as would i cos it would give me a rest for the day

Hey there Spellbyte,

Have you tried a simple "install OS over the top" - it might be quicker than trying to diagnose this problem as it sounds like Windows is corrupt

again this another thing i have suggested but as it's not his pc he has to wait to see if the owner has the OS disc

well the problem is solved, he ran the microsoft registry checker from DOS using scanreg/restore , it turns out that it had something to do with mywebsearch so the laptop said, but i cant see the link there, but anyway it's all fixed now, thanks for the tips though hengis

just a quick update, the mywebsearch was an email plugin that was in the same folder as shellfix. very confusing all this when ur not in front of the screen

k thanks spellbyte