Windows Explorer failing to launch, no icons on and mouse rightclick yields nothing

I have windows XP home edition and none of the icons appear on launch.
After booting it briefly flashes the task bar at the bottom (Start
button, etc) but that is it. My background image appears and I can
bring up the task manager with ctrl-alt-del. From there I can launch
msconfig and a command prompt. When I try to launch explorer from the
command prompt it briefly flashes the task bar but does not
successfully bring up a window. Now error appears in the command
prompt, it just returns like it was a successful launch. I've
unchecked all the startup apps and all startup processes that aren't
from MS. I get the same behavior on all user logins as well as on Safe
Mode.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

---Jay

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