I can't use my taskbar. I click the start button, nothing happens. I right click the icons in the tray nothing happens. The start button doesn't even light up to tell me the mouse is over it. And no windows appear on it, and no windows minimise to it.
I have so far tried refreshing the desktop (Which unsurprisingly had no effect) I have rebooted, restarted explorer.exe, which does bring the taskbar back but the start menu isn't populated.
Also now explorer.exe is constantly using 50% of my cpu power, so my fan is constantly on.
I've got vista, 32 bit. Dual Core 2.4Ghz 2Gb RAM, HP Pavilion dv6000.
This happened quite randomly to be honest, yesterday I was using my computer as normal, saving some files, then I closed photoshop and suddenly noticed that it was still in the taskbar, and I couldn't click it.
I just hope to god you guys have got some ideas, as I'm now crawling google, I would really like this fixed. Apart from the fact that if I minimise a window I lose it, and that this is making doing anything very difficult, plus the fact that's a lot of core power being used 24/7 by something that usually uses 2% or 3%.
Thanks in advance for any advice 
Well I found a hotfix which was supposed to correct problems with the taskbar not refrshing, and I doubted it would work, and it didn't 
I'm foing one last google search, and then I think I'll try either a system restore, or I might go ahead and install the Vista SP1...
I've now hit up performance monitor from windows, and the thread causing it to use all this cpu, is:
ntdll.dll!RtlIntegerToUnicodeString+0x67
And there are 4 or 5 of these going at a time, though only one of them is using the full 50 CPU. I suspended that one, and hey presto the CPU dropped and flatlined.
But resuming it knocks the cpu back up!
So far it appears that the ntdll is infected by a worm, virus of some kind, but I can't just delete it because it's part of the SYSTEM folder, and I don't ever touch that thing. I might replace it with another, downloaded from DllHole.com or somewhere like that...
So now I'm going to scan it, and see if it comes up with aything, and if it can repair it. If not, a system restore will hopefully solve the problem. Argh!
EDIT: Ok, I've done it again, problem solved before anyone replied 
I did a system restore to about a week ago and that seems to have solved the problem.
The problem appeared after a windows update, so I think I'll avoid the updates for a few weeks, unless there is a major security one.
Anyway PROBLEM SOLVED 
I think next time I might just not post, at least for a few days, I keep using up pointless threads 