Lost icons and taskbar

Seems like something going around this year all of the icons missing from your desktop and the taskbar is gone too. Seems like this one problem or symptom has many causes so it can be very frustrating for people. Just to put it out there, I had a friend with this problem today and what finally fixed it was uninstalling a popup blocker called stopzilla. It could possibly have been a contention issue with Norton Anti-virus causing it. That is the side effect of having to protect your machine. Creates more overhead, then because of the nature of some of these programs, where they are really hooked into the guts of the operating system trying to keep things tidy for you it can cause problems when things are just not lined up right. Course the alternative is having a totally fubar-ed computer. By the way, he was not running any anti-spyware software like I recommend and I installed one and it identified over 25 adware/spyware programs on his machine. Several of them were labeled critical. He was also behind on his virus and microsoft updates. Got to keep it up to date folks. Word to the wise. Spend a little money and time now, save yourself a lot of frustration later. Luckily he had a friend like me, but if he had to hire someone to clean up the problems it could cost hundreds of dollars in labor. Better to spend that money on software which you will have to buy anyway once you pay the tech guy.