Hello, I'm new to this site, so please bear with me.

I've recently been cleansing my system with various anti-spyware programs such as Ad-aware, Spybot S&D, etc...Everything was going fine - to the extent that only legitimate processes were running on my machine. I'd got rid of CoolWebSearch and various variants, and was pretty happy with my efforts.

Then I noticed a process called kb32.exe running in the background - I did a search through google, and found that many regard this program as malicious. I deleted kb32.exe using a piece of software called Killbot - which had successfully removed many other intruders. When i rebooted, the XP login screen appeared, the opening music played once I'd clicked on the user profile icon - then the desktop background image appeared - but nothing else. No icons, no taskbar, no start button. I discovered that explorer.exe was not running, and via task manager, tried to run explorer.exe - only to be told that "explorer.exe cannot be found". I'm able to find and run most programs through taskmanager, but its a bit of a pain.

Any advice on how to resolve this problem would be gratefully received.

First off I would try a System Restore to a point prior to that last deletion.

You can access System Restore via:
Task Manager:
in mgr, new task, type:cmd
In cmd type:
%systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

Jephree, thanks for the prompt reply.

System restore was my first idea - tried it, with varying checkpoints, to no avail; explorer.exe just won't run, automatically or otherwise.

Looked at the links, and acted on the advice - no joy. The account change via safe mode looked the most promising - trouble is, even the admin account in safe mode has no desktop, and no functioning explorer.exe.

As an aside, do you know how to start up, or browse Control Panel through TaskManager?

Thanks again for your assistance with this.

You might have to try repairing xp
Sorry if I am duplicating some of what jephree has already said but I can't get any of his links to work... I just get the error message "bad request" for some reason.

If you have a full version XP CD then try:

Insert disk holding the Shift key to keep disk from loading:

Then go to:

start/run (type in) sfc /scannow

Details here:

http://www.updatexp.com/scannow-sfc.html

If that fails Jaynee's suggestion of a Repair Install would be in order. Here is a very detailed description of that process:

http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Note that unless you have an XP SP2 disk you will need to reinstall SP2 ASAP.