IE shortcuts/favorites quit working

[DaveMac1960]

Hello All,
A few months ago, I was working in Visual Studio.net when I noticed my desktop refresh out of nowhere. I also noticed the 3 IE shortcuts on the desktop changed icons. When I clicked on them only a blank page displayed and when I deleted them and tried to recreate them I kept getting an error stating that "/" (along with some others) was a special character and cannot be used in a file name. Also all of my IE favorites no longer work and I get a similar type of error when trying to add new ones.

I'm pretty sure I got hit with some maleware as Trend Micro found evidence of it. I have gotten rid of the virus and I also ran a registry cleaner to clean up a bunch of registry errors successfully (along with clearing the browser cache) but I'm still having the problem.

Now, I'm trying to avoid having to reinstall from scratch but I will if I have to since I'm having some minor issues with .NET as a result of the initial virus. Can this be fixed or is nuking it the best option?

OS: Windows XP SP3
IE: IE v7.0.5
HP Compaq nx9600 laptop


Thanks in advance for any ideas,
Dave