I've recently been cleansing my system with various anti-spyware programs such as Ad-aware, Spybot S&D, etc...Everything was going fine - to the extent that only legitimate processes were running on my machine. I'd got rid of CoolWebSearch and various variants, and was pretty happy with my efforts.
Then I noticed a process called kb32.exe running in the background - I did a search through google, and found that many regard this program as malicious. I deleted kb32.exe using a piece of software called Killbot - which had successfully removed many other intruders. When i rebooted, the XP login screen appeared, the opening music played once I'd clicked on the user profile icon - then the desktop background image appeared - but nothing else. No icons, no taskbar, no start button. I discovered that explorer.exe was not running, and via task manager, tried to run explorer.exe - only to be told that "explorer.exe cannot be found". I'm able to find and run most programs through taskmanager, but its a bit of a pain.
Any advice on how to resolve this problem would be gratefully received.
