Everything disappeared from Desktop except an Outlook Express shor

[Guest]

I'm teaching my father-in-law how to use his new Windows XP laptop. We were
reading email in Outlook Express. I turned away for a second and he did
something which caused EVERYTHING on the Desktop to disappear, the Taskbar
disappeared, the Recycle Bin disappeared. Everything disappeared - except a
single shortcut to Outlook Express which wasn't there before.

Right-click doesn't work. Ctrl-Alt-Delete doesn't work. Nothing works except
double-click on the Outlook Express shortcut.

What happened? And how do I recover? We rebooted the machine and everything
came back normally. But I've no idea what he did to get in this funny state.
Any suggestions?

 

[Guest]

It sounds like explorer crashed. As long as it is not a continuing issue you
have nothing to worry about. If it does continute to occur, put in the
windows CD, open up a command window (start run cmd) and type in sfc -scannow
. This should be taken with a bit of caution since it checks if all files
are in their correct versions and not modified, if they have been it replaces
it with the CD's copy. After running this a reboot should be completed and
windows update ran. Since it is replacing system files backups of data should
always be completed before the operation is run.