Lost my desktop and start bar

So i've been running Windows 7 pretty fine for the past month. However, I just did an easy transfer from my old laptop (running XP) to my new system, but I'm not sure if this is the cause of my problems. My computer starts up fine, I get to the Windows 7 login screen and enter my password. What happens then is that my desktop goes black and I no longer see my start menu. I do still see the message at the lower right corner (Windows 7 build @&#@(* beta release) but no background. I also still see my mouse cursor and can move it around. However, when I right click with my mouse nothing happens.

I've been able to do Ctrl+Alt+del and bring up the task menu and from there start a new task and launch firefox and other programs. I've entered into the display options and tried resizing the display, changing the background, etc. I'm able to resize my display but it doesn't bring back by desktop background or start menu. Changing the background does not actually change the background.

I've went through and updated my video card driver, but that did not fix the issue either. Also, went into safe mode, but still the same issue.

One thing I noticed when all these issues started to occur was that my admin icon was the same as my old laptop that was running XP and that when I log-in to Windows 7 it now takes a lot longer than it used to to load.

Can anyone help me???

I have the exact same issue, however mine occured when I installed sparebackup. - Basically a program that automatically scans your computer and uploads important file to a remote backup server.

The only way I could get out of it was to boot from my windows CD and launch system restore and restore to before I installed it.

One thing I will add is that i can occasionally get the taskbar and desktop back, however the icon in the taskbar for explorer is empty and i cannot click anything on the taskbar its just frozen. Killing explorer and restarding it does not fix the issue. It seems as through explorer gets corrupted. Is there a way to restore explorer to its original condition.

Oh yeh, sfc /scannow does not fix the issue.