The other day my main workstation was slow to respond. So I used AusLogics Disk Defrag (a free defragging tool) to defrag and speed up my hard drive. It completed the task in a few minutes. The workstation was still slow, so I decided to reboot the computer. The login came up and I entered the user name and password and sat back for the desktop to come up. At this point I was called away and left the workstation to continue its loading.
I didn’t get back to the computer till the next morning and the screen was blue (not a Blue Screen Of Death) with no desktop icons. I though this strange, so I rebooted, logged in and after waiting about 10 minutes, there were still no icons on the desk top. I pressed Alt-Ctrl-Del to get the Task Manager and ran some of my programs. They worked as normal, but still no icons on the desktop. On the processes tab, I noticed that explorer.exe was near the top of the list in terms of activity, but it wasn’t doing its job. So I deleted the explorer.exe process and voila the desktop icons all returned. Another problem solved.