My laptop (IBM Intel pentium) was running kind of slow so I ran several iolo System Mechanic "clean-up" and "performance" functions (disk defrag, registery cleanup, internet optimize, junk file cleanup) with the hope of improving the performance. Well, it did not improve the performance (it still is kind of slow) and after rebooting (iolo SM did a bunch of "DOS" stuff during the reboot), all of these problems showed up.
The symptoms: the running applications do not show up on the desktop "botton" task bar; the "speaker" and "network connection" icons have disappeared from the lower right corner system tray (I was able to workaround the network connection through the wifi card icon though but had to respecify my SSID and WPA key), the file "copy" and "move" functions (both click-on commands and drag-n-drop) do not work, the device manager "system properties" does not work and IE8 will not startup (although mozilla firefox seems to work fine).
If any of the experts could provide some suggestions on how I can recover from this mess, I would greatly appreciate it. I scanned through the "reparing XP" sticky and some of the other posts that seemed related to fixing XP, but they did not seem to directly address my situation. I have the original Win XP Pro CD (does not include SP1, SP2 or SP3 though) and a separate SP2 CD
Thanks .. Ken
Edited by KenPC, 19 March 2010 - 08:38 PM.