No icons, taskbar, nor start menu accessible on desktop

[Eugene Beer]

I used Control Panel->Remove Programs to remove Date Mgr,
Precision Time, and Morpheus (all programs that had Gain
or Gator adware associated with them). A few minutes
after apparent successful removal but before I had a
chance to reboot, my neighborhood had a power hit and my
system went down ungracefully.

Forever more since then, upon booting up, the desktop has
no icons, no taskbar, no Start button--just the background
JPG image. To run a program I have to bring up Task Mgr
(CTRL-ALT-DELETE) and manually type in the name of the
application I want to run. I tried to run rstrui.exe
(System Restore to a previous "capture point," but the
rstrui window pops up with nothing in it--completely
blank. I can run iexplore.exe to bring up Internet
Explorer but it cannot spawn any secondary IE windows.
I.e. if I click on a link on the web that would require a
second IE window to come up, nothing happens.

How can I fix this?

 

[Malke]

I used Control Panel->Remove Programs to remove Date Mgr,
Precision Time, and Morpheus (all programs that had Gain
or Gator adware associated with them). A few minutes
after apparent successful removal but before I had a
chance to reboot, my neighborhood had a power hit and my
system went down ungracefully.

Forever more since then, upon booting up, the desktop has
no icons, no taskbar, no Start button--just the background
JPG image. To run a program I have to bring up Task Mgr
(CTRL-ALT-DELETE) and manually type in the name of the
application I want to run. I tried to run rstrui.exe
(System Restore to a previous "capture point," but the
rstrui window pops up with nothing in it--completely
blank. I can run iexplore.exe to bring up Internet
Explorer but it cannot spawn any secondary IE windows.
I.e. if I click on a link on the web that would require a
second IE window to come up, nothing happens.

How can I fix this?

At this point, you can try a Repair Install and hope that you don't have
to do a full reinstall and restore data from backup.

Malke