User account is missing icons, files, and wallpaper.

Hello,

I'm using Windows XP Pro. This computer is 6 years old.

There are two user accounts on this computer, my girlfriend's and mine. The computer was freezing do I restarted it. After doing so her user account started behaving strange. Her wallpaper is gone and the wallpaper is solid blue now. All of the icons, except for my game shortcuts, and files that were on her desktop aren't showing up. Also, it looks like the desktop is using the boxy grey Win98 theme instead of the blue XP theme.

After an hour or so of me running scans on my user account it froze up again. I restarted it and my desktop was doing the same thing, although it kept the XP theme. I restarted again and the OS wanted to run checkdisk. I let it run to completion. My desktop is fine again and hers is still behaving strangely. I tried running a system restore but nothing changed. I tried to end process on explorer.exe and manually reopen it but it didn't change anything.

And now my account is doing it again. No wallpaper, the computer is running slower, and I can't seem to open images or videos.

What should be my next step? Malwarebytes is freezing and so is Avast. I'm going to try SuperAntiSpyware in the mean time.

Try downloading one of the versions of Rkill.exe and see if it runs before trying to run any AntiVirus/AntiMalware. After you've done that a log file of what processes were killed is usually created.

It doesn't look like it found anything. There wasn't anything listed under "Processes terminated by Rkill or while it was running:"

Quick note though, toward the end when it was running the desktop disappeared (icons, taskbar, start menu, etc) and my wallpaper showed up again. Then everything went back to solid blue wallpaper and whatnot.