So, I found my way here by googling that my taskbar and desktop icons disappear at start-up (they show up for about three seconds.) If I hit ctrl+alt+del while the icons are visible the task manager shows up, but then it disappears with my icons and everything else. It seems like all the answers I found here were to run the task manager and open the explorer.exe or something similar. The only keys that I can seem to get to work is Windows Key+L to log out of the desktop and shut down the computer. The last thing that i remember doing before the icons disappeared was putting in a cd to rip, but it had an autoplay feature, so it opened its own player, I canceled it and ejected the CD and then everything disappeared. Thanks for any help!