Help! My desktop icons are gone :(

Hi. I just bought a new laptop less than a week ago. It's an Asus G50VT-X1 running Windows Vista Home Premium. The only thing I've done on it pretty much was install World of Warcraft and some virus protection. A couple of days ago I was on internet explorer when the screen froze. I had to use task manager to close it and when the window closed, all my desktop icons were gone. After I restarted the computer they reappeared. I've used it for a few days afterwards with no problem.

Tonight I booted up my computer and the icons are gone again only this time, they won't come back. I'm able to bring them back temporarily by going into task manager, ending explorer.exe and then starting it again but as soon as I restart the computer, the icons are gone. I'm able to access them when I go look at the C drive and the desktop folder. I've also selected "desktop" on the taskbar and still no icons.

Does anyone have any idea what's going on? I can't believe I'm having so much trouble with a new computer.

Also, I've read that a trojan called Vundo might be the culprit but a virus/spyware scan is coming up with nothing.

Thanks

 

Vundo is pretty hard to get rid of (if you do have it).

I would recommend a re-installation of Windows, get a firewall, no more internet explorer etc (if you do have it).

 

download and run malwarebytes.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php

this thing kills everything.

well, almost everything.

 

Ok, I've done a scan with a program called SUPERanitspyware. People said it had no problem detecting Vundo. It didn't find anything other than internet cookies. Just to be safe, I ran a Vundo remover program from my Antivirus provider, again nothing.

I think it must be something else. I'll try a system restore now but I'd really like to know what caused it in the first place so it doesn't happen again.

 

Do you select "Show Desktop Icons" when you right click on your desktop - View?

 

Yup, I did that already. It was one of the first things I found when searching about this problem.

update: I haven't done a system restore yet. I decided to install the latest version of the Nvidia drivers since the ones my laptop came with weren't the newest. So I uninstalled the ones on my laptop, restarted and presto, the desktop icons returned. Then I installed the latest drivers, restarted and the icons disappeared again. Does this mean it's an Nvidia thing?

 

ok, I've reinstalled windows from the recover cd and so far (fingers crossed) it loads with the desktop icons but I'm worried because I never found the cause of the problem after MUCH searching. I only have a week to return this laptop. If this happens again, I don't want to have to keep reinstalling windows.

Has anyone else had this problem and figured out the cause of it?

 

ok, I'm pretty sure I found the cause of my missing icons. It was user error of course. My Asus laptop has a feature called Powergear4extreme. It's a button I can use to change power usage options and one of them is called "quiet office" and makes the icons on your desktop dissapear. I guess I clicked that button and didn't realize it.

Anyway,
thanks all for your help!