I booted up my old Windows XP SP3 machine today. It was slower than usual getting to the desktop and when it finally got there the only things showing was a request from Avast Free to use Webrep and the desktop icons. No taskbar or start menu. I didn’t know what this Webrep thing was so I clicked Don’t Install or whatever the button said. Still no Start menu or taskbar. Thankfully Ctrl+Alt+Del was working and I could open Task Manager.
I restarted the computer and was greeted by another Avast request to use Webrep. This time I clicked Install to see if it would go away and give my back the Taskbar and Start menu. Still didn’t work. I tried opening Avast through the desktop icon and found that nothing Avast related was working- no realtime protection and it wouldn’t update. Since the Webrep thing was new and related to Avast I tried disabling Avast through msconfig and rebooting. Still no taskbar or Start menu.
I tried disabling everything through msconfig- all non-Microsoft services and startup items. Still no taskbar or Start menu.
Curiously I found that booting in to Safe Mode would bring back the taskbar and Start menu and Malwarebytes Antimalware would run. If I tried to run Malwarebytes Antimalware in regular mode I would see an error message “run-time error 372” I think it was and it wouldn’t run.
When I ran a quick scan with Malwarebytes Antimalware in Safe Mode I didn’t find anything amiss. Didn’t see anything malware related in HiJackThis in Windows’ regular mode. Process Explorer (a better version of Task Manager) didn’t show anything questionable. I opened Task Manger and ran appwiz.cpl to get to Add/Remove Programs and uninstalled Avast and now everything is ok. My Start menu and taskbar are back and Malwarebytes Antimalware is working properly in regular mode.
tl;dr
today after the Webrep update I didn’t have a Start menu or taskbar
tried some things that didn’t work
finally uninstalled Avast and now I have a Start menu and taskbar again
So what happened?