A pc running xp had disppearing icons and the start menu was gone. All that remained was the wallpaper. Virus clean, etc. PC would only boot in safe mode and all setting worked. In normal mode ctrl, alt/del would bring up task manager, but explorer.exe would not come up. After much exploration, I decided to do a non destructive system restore to no avail, restore to last know good config, and finally the Big System Restore. The desktop went through the Restore, and finished. Then the desktop would come up black. Only Safe-Mode would work. Task manager would not even come up in normal mode. The PC was rebooted nearly 7 times and out of the blue came up in normal mode. The system was rebooted several times and came up normal each time. Microsoft updates (18) were applied and the system would not come back up in Normal Mode (only Safe Mode). Could this possibly be a bad driver or card or something I am missing? I am at wits end?