Task manager gone ctrl+alt+delete doesn't work

I am having a XP based laptop since a year now, it was working good until last night. Today morning while working I tried to open task manger to kill a process and here the problem starts. I kept pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del but nothing came up. This is how we launch taskmanager, right ? Seems like my Ctrl+Alt+Del keys stopped responding for this purpose. Alternatively I tried running task manager.exe but that gives me error saying it no more exists.

I don’t have any idea what could be the problem as am logged in as Administrator and it was working fine till yesterday. I thought could be some malware or virus. Scanned my entire system but antivirus too couldn’t find anything suspicious. Any help ?

Well there are two more ways to launch Task manager. You should try out the same as well.

First:
Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc. This is another shortcut for task manager.

Second:
Right click your task bar and from below second option is Task manager. Click the same.

Other than this, you can also download a small utility that will you to Creates copies of REGEDIT, MSCONFIG and Task Manager

Let me know what happens.

I appreciate your help friend, but none of them worked for me

I tried Ctrl + Shift + Esc, still taks manager wont appears. Also downloaded the utility and it made a copy of regedit and
msconfig but not for the Task Manager. I don’t know why.

What now ?

Than the only thing left is to repairing your system files.

To do this, Go to Start > Run. Type "SFC /SCANNOW" and press Enter.

i had the same problem and i fixed like that:
1. Start >>> Run,(copy & paste): REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableTaskMgr /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
and the i replaced my taskmgr file
2.Windows\System 32
i uploaded a file like that so you can fix it easy....
hope this is helpful fore sombody else