lol
sure ill go down to the states to back my data up

lol

i know i can backup data
i have dual partition too

and what i was saying is, the OS needs to be reinstalled
and hdd needs to be formated to do that
no matter how u back up (without those backup programs), u still lose the registries

btw

sad news, my friend Herrich couldnt fix the problem
formating is the only solution now

i doubt anyone who doesnt work in MS can fix this

sigh...
stupid shell replacement

evil, did you do a search/find for :
shelliconcache
delete it and let windows rebuild it on bootup ?

well i suppose i could give it a try

but not sure if it will do the trick

evil, you should atleast try it before reformating. When you delete the shelliconcache file and reboot, that forces windows to rebuild the entire desktop, icons and all on bootup. This file at times get corrupted or damaged and must be rebuilt, just like the winsock32.dll.