Can't return default desktop properties

This is going to be hard to describe. I have a user on my network that has done something to the appearance of their desktop. The workstation in question is a NT4 SP6A box. The user was not a power user. They are a member of a few of the less privileged user groups, domain users, and other special user groups with mostly read permissions to different resources on the network. They called me last week because they could not open an application (database client) it said in essence, that she couldnot open it because she did not have write permission to the local hard drive, the client software would abort, there has never been an issue with domain users and an inability to run the DB client. I logged onto the machine with admin privilege andwas successful at starting the DB client. Another peculiarity was the appearance of the desktop icons and the administrative shares$ on the local drives. The security permissions seemed set to be what they were supposed to be and I could connect to them remotely without any problems. The drive icons in Explorer and on the desktop all looked similar to the devices icon in the control panel over the top of the original icon. The drive shares looked as if they had been tampered with in some way because where the little hand that held the folder would typically be, there was an image of some kind of drive (not the default.) To quickly return her to work I made her a member of the Power Users group on that machine enabling her to make changes to the contents of the hard disk. The icons and shares look strange no matter who is logged onto the machine, no matter what their level of access is. I cannot figure out how to return the systems? icon and shares appearance back to normal. I have tried all of the standard stuff to return the desktop properties back to the default. I do not know what is going on. Has anyone encountered anything like this?