Windows not booting all the way (please help)

[Staren]

I am having a rather strange problem with my older Win ME computer. I was working on getting it back up to speed. I did a defrag, scandisk, and a disk cleanup, but now Windows will not boot all the way. The log-in prompt for my wireless access comes up, my desktop image comes up, and I hear the start-up sound, but I don't have any desktop icons, or my start bar. Nothing but my background. When I bring up the task manager I see three tasks, Explorer, Rundll, and one other standard one I can't remember right now. I can't right-click or anything. The pointer goes back to the standard arrow, and the hard drive led isn't active so it doesn't look like the computeris working anymore after this. Anyone have an idea what is going on?

Just some more info. I did test safe-mode just now, and it seems to bring everything up fine. So the whatever the problem is, it isn't that deep at least. Guess it's time to pull the importent files and do a reformat.

[glc]

Try a system restore before you wipe it.

[Staren]

Ya I tried that last night. A restore from safe-mode fixed whatever in the world that was. There's no way what I did could have erased a crtitical file, but you never know I guess.