No taskbar, mouse unresponsive

When I turned on the T61 this morning and the desktop loaded, the taskbar is not there; instead, it's a black bar on the bottom, and the system seemed to be running some things forever, with the mouse being totally unresponsive. Can't locate or point to the Start button. Task Manager doesn't show any application running. This remains the same way even if I restart the computer, or shut it completely and rebooting. After several times shutdown/restart, I got back the normal screen, but I still don't know what went wrong and how to fix it if it happens again.

Does anyone have any idea what might be the cause? TIA.

I have XP pro, by the way.

 

Maybe you can start it in safe mode and run an adware/virus scan? If that doesn't work, check what's starting up that takes so long to run and disable it.

 

I am attaching a list of the startup programs in my computer. There are many! Please tell me if this is normal and which ones I can uncheck. There are also many programs under "services" tab and I'm not sure how many of them are necessary. TIA!

 

OK, I've attached a picture of what you should uncheck (I squared it in red) but before you do, I'd like to add some input.

"jusched" is a java auto update thing, you don't need it, you can manually update every week or whenever through control panel>java

"reader_sl" is part of adobe reader to make it load faster. i highly recommend you uninstall this reader and install foxit pdf reader. here's the link. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

Once you uncheck all this and click apply, restart and it should boot up much easier. If it does, please report back here to let me know how it went.

 

Thanks a ton for the great help! I unchecked all those programs. I also downloaded the foxit--it indeed looks like a very nice PDF reader, much faster than adobe.

(By the way, what about those programs under the "services" tab? There are even more programs than the startups.)

I'll see if the original problem will come back or not. It happened a second time earlier today when I was updating my system. It seems the screen display was frozen (I'm sure you've seen what it's like: the windows get hundreds of copies, whenever you move a window, it's old image stays in old position under the new position, so you get a whole stack of windows...). When putting the mouse on where the taskbar should be, it's not a point arrow, but a vertical two-direction arrow, without any response.

I'll report back any news! Thanks again!

 

When that happens, it usually means there's a process that's not responding. So when that happens, hit ctrl+alt+del and pull up the task manager. There should a be a program there that is not responding. Just terminate that process. Also, if it doesn't get rid of itself, click over to the processes tab and sort it out by CPU. It should be at the top, so right click it and end process that way, ALSO, MAKE SURE IT IS NOT SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS, BUT THE NEXT ONE.

Also, how much RAM does your system run?

 

must besome type of spyware or virus

 

I have 1 GB RAM. I did press ctrl+alt+del, but it shows no application running, many processes, though. And then even this task manager window became "sticky" (multiplies whenever moving the window and stays there). Ifi it happens again I'll try ending some process (could it cause serious undesired results if I ended the wrong process?).

Thanks again!

 

It's something I was afraid of. I ran Avast antivirus and it didn't catch any virus, except it wasn't able to scan "archive" due to "password protected". Does it mean I must remove the login password in order to scan archive? Any other free Antivirus that might complement the Avast's capability to catch viruses? Thanks.

 

Also how much virtual mem you have you might be running low on virtual memory
and disk space too.

 

My computer T61 is pretty low end. I'm not using much space. Now what keeps happening today is: when I turned it on and desktop loaded, if I put the cursor on the bottom (taskbar), the arrow immediately becomes the sandglass, and it will never end. The task manager shows NO application, but many processes, running. I can't click on Start button because the cursor remains to be the sandglass when on taskbar (when I take it away from taskbar and put it on other areas of the desktop it became the arrow again). So the only way to terminate everything is to Restart or Shutdown--when doing so, a message appears saying something (often something called "Tpshock.exe") is running, and I click OK to end it. But when I restart the computer, everything repeats over again. This last time I got through simply by clicking on the Firefox icon *very quickly* as soon as the desktop loaded and before the mouse arrow became the sandglass.

Any idea what goes on? I didn't do anything special in the last couple days before this problem began.

Could my access to financial web site such as yahoo, google, lead to some virus that may cause this?

laptopbuy131: I tried to end "processes" but was not sure which process to end, and by ending any one it didn't help.

 

Download and install Adaware and Spybot - Search & Destroy. Boot up your laptop in safe mode and scan the whole pc with those programs. Make sure you clear your cookies and temporary internet files before scanning this. Also make sure to update those programs before scanning. Please report back.

 

Thanks laptopbuy131. I downloaded those two programs and scanned my computer with them. The spybot listed some things it found, which I simply used "fix the problem" to remove all of them--I don't know if this is what I was supposed to do, but now I get more problems: Some web site can't be reached by IE, and the "Blocking Cookies" feature of some site does not work any more. So I wonder if I shouldn't remove those item? Is there a way to recover or solve the problem? Sorry for being so clueless!