This is an odd one. My boss complained that his computer was acting very slow, was getting popups, and malewarebytes and spybot were both disabled (please check to see if the file exists, yada), even on safe mode. So we used Avast and it removed a bunch of infected files, but now upon reboot, all he gets is the login sound, and then nothing but the blue background screen (no menus, no bar at the bottom). so i rebooted in safe mode with networking, and all we got was the login sound and the black background screen with the safemode border. I can ctrl-alt-delete to show the task manager, and it shows there are some programs running... but we just cannot get working XP visual.
any ideas? this is on xp.