Uh... that's new...

[Imogene]

So, I'm borrowing an old tower from the parents until my old one gets fixed... it's been running fine for some time now... all of a sudden tonight, it has decided to start playing games. It keeps attempting to reload the startup programs and programs that are already running, which is hiding my taskbar and all the objects on my desktop, making it impossible to reset the comp... now, at least, it's continuously cycling that restart problem, whereas before it got stuck in the middle, with no taskbar at all, no windows button functionality...
Any thoughts?

[MrSmiley]

Well all I want to say really is repeating what you wrote in the topic: "Uh.... that's new...". I've never heard or seen such behaviour before. All I can figure however is that somehow explorer.exe (which is actually the main GUI including the taskbar and the Windows button) or specific settings got corrupted.

What I would do is get windows into Safe mode (press the F8 key when you see the "Windows is starting" text line) and from there either pop in your windows cd and try to load the repair proceedure (which should check and replace damaged system files).... run system file checker (sfc /scannow)... run the "Check Disk for Errors" on the hard drive... run a virus scanner.

These are general "first steps" since this is certainly new weird behaviour to me too.

[Imogene]

According to a website I found, I can end and restart explorer as a task, and that should fix it...
And, it works, for a little while, but not nearly long enough, sadly, so, I set up checkdisk to run next time I restart the comp...

Withut running checkdisk, my taskbar seems to have stabilized... when I ran a movie file in Media Player, the taskbar just suddenly started working again. No idea exactly what I did that fixed it...