No icons on desktop

[Troyster]

I have a PII 700Mhz, 128MB, Computer running WIN 2000. I turned the computer on one day and I log on and everything was working as normal but no desktop Icons or windows start bar. After a couple reboots and letting sit with the "no icon screen" for awhile I hit Cntrl-Alt-Del and and I manually run explorer.exe from my C:\WINNT
drive, and as soon as I do this, everything pops up - icons, toolbar, etc. Then it works perfectly normal.

Any ideas?

I did not download or install anything new before this that I am aware of.

thx
Troy

[AnnMarie]

Hi Troyster - there are a couple of viruses that can cause this problem. Go here (http://housecall.trendmicro.com/) and run the free online scanner. Post back and let us know the results.

[Troyster]

Ok, this is what was found... it's my father that has this problem and this is what he sent me:

The on-line program you
forwarded found 11 viruses, and they all were non-cleanable. The
instructions said to delete them. So, I started deleting them. 7
files were deleted, 3 gave me messages that said I would have to delete
the entire file to get rid of the virus, so I left those alone (didn't
want to delete things I may need), and one file said I couldn't delete
it because it was currently in use, which was interesting, because the
virus was BKDR RCFLOOD.BI, and it was in C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32
\EXPLORER.EXE.

Is this cleanable or should I wipe clean for him

Thx
Troy

[dickster]

It was probably this one.

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/backdoor.irc.flood.html

You can try this to remove it.

http://lockdowncorp.com/bots/review.html

[AnnMarie]

Hi troyster - C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\EXPLORER.EXE is not a valid windows file.

It might be a good idea if we had a look at his startup list. Tell him to go here (http://www.spywareinfo.com/files/startuplist.zip) and download and run Startup List. It will generate a log file. Copy the log and paste it back into this thread.