CTE XPL error - very strange

[Bozman]

I boot up the machine, and before the desktop appears, I get a window in the middle of the screen. Behind the window is the desktop picture, but no icons or system tray. In the window is a red dot, in the red dot are these letters, CTE and right below those XPL. You can either click on the close box, or on the dot, both do the same thing. Once you click, the window fades away, similar to a mirage effect, and I am left with just the desktop picture. Upon reboot, the window does not come back, but I also do not get any desktop icons or system tray. I can get the task manager, but explorer/systray/IE etc. won't run. Safe mode is the same, no icons, no systray. I reformatted the hard drive, re-installed, and next day same thing happened! Please, if anyone has any ideas or help, it would be much appreciated. BTW, before it crashed, I ran Norton Antivirus with latest updates and found no viruses.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Mark.

 

[bcastner]

What is your monitor model?

 

[Bozman]

The monitor is a nec accusync 75F.

 

[bcastner]

Try right-clicking the desktop and stopping Active Destktop, or removing any Web Pages defined there as the desktop background.

 

[Bozman]

I can`t click on the desktop, nothing comes up. The only thing I can get to appear is the ctrl-alt-del task manager. It doesn`t matter if I am in safe mode or not. But thanks for the idea, I wish it were that simple.

 

[bcastner]

If from Task Manager, you do File, Start New Task, explorer.exe

Does your desktop re-appear?

If so, download and run these in order:

Hijack This!
Spybot 1.2
AdAware

In all three cases use the options menu on the program to obtain the most recent definition files. Follow the programs advice as to what to remove. Stop after each one, reboot, and see if the problem has gone away. If not, go to the next program in the order above.

All programs can be found here:

http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/hijacked/#removal

 

[Bozman]

I try to run explorer, it starts but something kills it about a second after it starts...so ultimately, nothing happens. I do run msconfig, but there is nothing I can see that would have this effect. I can't run explorer, Internet Explorer, my Email program. I can run notepad, msconfig, system file checker. I checked the system files, but they checked out ok. Thanks for the idea.