no start menu displayed

[Lapinrabbit]

My kids system has lkost the start menu. It does not respond to the start button on the key board either. Nor is on autohide. It just is not there. The inly way to open programs is though my computer. Shut down only via ctrl-alt-del. Any ideas, or should I just wipe it and start again. I really don't wan to todo that inbcase it happens again. They download a lot of stuff, and it my be something they did. Anit-virus is AVG and Zone alarm is the fire wall.
Thanks for the help.

[Paul Komski]

Does it function in Safe Mode - or after Restore Last Know Good from the F8 options during startup?

[Lapinrabbit]

I restarted it in sfae mode and the bar was there. When I restarted it in regular mode it remained. Thanks for the info. My question is what happened? Just so I know if it is something the kids downloaded or not.

[Paul Komski]

If booting into SafeMode has corrected things then I'm not really sure why. Sometimes, from experience, just booting into SafeMode can reset the whole Desktop as well as the icons on it. Possibly this has something to do with the ShellIconCache - but that's only a guess. I thought you might have some malware on board and Safe Mode could have avoided kicking off any such programs that would start up during a normal boot.

[Lapinrabbit]

thanks for the input/ Their system stil kicks out the start menu bar, requiring me to restart in safe mode and then regular mode. Then the start (task) bar is back. Weird. Perhaps I should format their drive and startover. I just would like to know the rason so I can avoid it happening again.