I have a computer that drives my laser and mechanical engraver. I was vectorizing a file to be engraved by my mechanical engraver and my computer locked up. I was able to do a restart from the Windows Task Manager, but after the restart went through its normal start-up, my desktop displayed only some of the files and folders that were there,and no longer displayed the START button and icon tray in the lower left and right corners of the screen.

Am I dealing with a corrupted file here? If this helps, I am able to go onto my other networked computer and view all of the files and folders that should be displaying on the desktop, as well as all everything else that is on the hard drive on that machine.

David... a couple of weeks ago my computer did EXACTLY THE SAME THING! After trying a lot of different things the one thing that finally worked was to put in the original windows xp cd in the drive and re-booted the computer. It has worked perfectly ever since... don't know what the heck happened there.

Good luck!

Joe,

The Windows XP repair process took care of the problem, but brought on a few other issues with drivers, not finding file xyz, etc. Another odd issue is that my cordless optical mouse no longer works. I tried it on several computers.

I finally hooked up my corded mouse and got the system back into order and am good to go. I had three same-day orders that I had committed to just before the computer went into freak mode. I was able to take care of the largest and most critical one in time, and the other customers were very, very kind and understanding and plan to pick their orders up on Monday.

It's time to call it a day. :-) 

Just a wild guess, but you may have lost a cluster on the hard drive that contained the Windows ini file or part of the register.

The mouse may have blown at a critical moment that messed up that cluster, (or sector).

You may have to do a scandisk with a complete surface check and see if there is a permanent problem or it was transient.

Philadelphia, PA (Really Bensalem)

Harvey's Tips Page When you finally understand it completely... it changes.

Harvey,

Now that everything is working well, do you recommend I do the scandisk to identify any issues?

David,
This is late in regards to your challenge, but when that happened to ME I simply turned the thing off and did a cold boot. All was well.

Sometimes, memory can become corrupt or unstable a well.( Much as happens to my own :'-(  ) and will cause the problem you described. I'm glad you got it taken care of.