See http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/how-to-rebuild-the-icon-cache-in-windows-vista/ You can try to reset the Windows icon cache. Open the Task Manager (Shift+Ctrl+ESC) In the Process tab, right-click on the Explorer.exe process and select End Process. Open the file picker via "File > New Task (Run)" and click the Browse button. Type or Paste %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local in the File name field (AppData is a hidden folder). Select the file IconCache.db and use Delete in the right-click context menu to delete the file. After the IconCache.db has been deleted, start a new explorer.exe process via "File > New Task" to get the desktop and Taskbar back. It is possible that the file IconCache.db is a hidden file and in that case you need to enable viewing hidden files. You can verify that you can see the file before doing the above mentioned steps. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Show_hidden_files_and_folders ---- Your above posted system details show outdated plugin(s) with known security and stability risks. *Shockwave Flash 10.0 r2 Update the [[Managing the Flash plugin|Flash]] plugin to the latest version. *http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/