I lost my tool bar and my icons on my desktop. How do I get them back?

Answer 1

restart your computer first

Answer 2

HI, wanted to drop in and add a few thoughts. Have you looked into whether or not you may have accidently set your toolbar to "autohide"? When this occurs, the toolbar will hide down below the bottom of the window, or, whichever area of the screen you have set it, (some people do prefer it either on top, or to the right/left of the screen, rather than at the bottom, oddly enough) and when you pass your mouse cursor down by the area it will pop into view.

This doesn't account for the hidden icons though, but could it be possible that somehow "hide inactive icons" is set?

Now, these two configurations are different settings, so it would be very odd indeed for both to have been enabled, without your knowledge, which could point to a virus, other malware, or somebody pulling a prank on you.

However, with both of these settings enabled, you can't click on the Start menu to reach the Control Panel to reverse them. It is a bit of a catch 22 situation. The best bet would be to somehow get your system back to a date that predates the changes, which you have already attempted.

Just a couple more thoughts for you to mule over.

Try right clicking on the desktop and see if a shortcut menu appears. If so, click on either Personalization, (Vista) or Preferences, (XP), and then check around in there and see what settings you can locate.

On the Desktop tab, there is a Customize button at the bottom which has options for certain system icons showing up or not on the desktop, such as My Computer, My Documents, etc, and a Wizard which can run every so often and "clean up unused icons". I personally think this icon cleanup wizard intrusive, good intentions of Microsoft aside, I think I can know when I am finished with an icon, and would rather delete them than have them swept into a folder that is then displayed on the desktop.

You can also right click and try clicking on Refresh, which supposidly refreshes the desktop area.

If I come up with any more ideas I will post them, have a good afternoon and holiday.

Answer 3

press ctrl+alt+del then click new task and type in explorer. you may need to restore your system after doing such to fix errors.

Answer 4

at desk top, right click for drop down menu, and click "view" and click "show desktop icon"
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