No desktop, no start button, no task bar, but everything works

Vista Home Basic

Upon restart, I get only a Windows Explorer window open on a black
background. I can navigate anywhere and therefore start FireFox or
anything else. But as I said, there is no task bar or start button.
Control + Escape doesn't get the menu. Window + R doesn't get the Run
box. system restore has no previous restore points.

I called Everex (that's the brand) tech support, and the tech wants me
to reinstall Vista. I told her, I'd try some less radical approach
first. She was mistaken on some other matters that I knew about, so I
don't trust her judgment.

So, does anybody have any ideas?

Are you saying that you *can* navigate anywhere or not?

Try making a new user profile, and log into that. If that one works okay,
just delete the old one.

I still think that making a fresh user profile may be the best solution, but
if you can open Task Manager, can you start a new process, explorer.exe?

Try this: Click start and type REGEDIT, then hit <enter> to open the
registry editor. Expand the keys at left by clicking the plus (+) signs to
reach this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Click on this key and locate the 'shell' string in the right pane. Double
click it, replace the contents with just

explorer.exe

Click ok, then close the registry editor and reboot the machine.

The current contents of that key is: Explorer.exe C:\WINDOWS\Config
\csrss.exe
Is that normal?

As Synapse Syndrome suggested, I started a new task in Task Manager,
explorer.exe, and it worked. I haven't rebooted yet. I thinking I
should make this registry edit first.

The regedit was successful. Everything is normal now. Thank you.

But now, what happened? I was installing a trial version of Office
2007, and I remember being asked for csrss.exe to be in the start up.
I consented. During the problem, I noticed two instances of csrss
running in task manager.

Not sure why it happened, or why it was inserted in that location, but it's
wrong. Glad to hear it's fixed.

Let me ask a question to clear some things up:
Windows Explorer is the file browser that is part of Windows, in my
case, Windows Vista.
Explorer.exe is the Windows shell, and it resides in C/Windows. It
makes the task bar, start button, and I previously thought it made the
file browser too.
Apparently, the file browser and the shell are not the same. I was
getting an open file browser window, but nothing else.

So if I was getting this file browser why wasn't the rest of
explorer.exe working?

The problem is the registry entry, it was loading more than just
explorer.exe. In this case, it was loading:

Explorer.exe C:\WINDOWS\Config\csrss.exe

which was failing causing explorer to not be able to load the desktop shell.
Why the entry got corrupted is more the issue, but I've seen several
different things cause it - mostly shell enhancement programs.

WE HAVE GENIUSES HERE!!! I had this same issue here on my laptop and was extremely fearful of having to go back to the basic reinstall of Vista. Thanks to this forum, my laptop is working. Thank you, so very much. I'm an old goat and a little set in my ways. I really don't like to change things. You people are the greatest. I'm proud to be a member of this group.

Not really a forum kinda guy, but had to jump through the registration hoops to send a BIG THANKS to you guys, had the same problem on a mission critical machine, only reason I didn't get fired was I work for myself. You saved the day and a weekend of re-formatting - much appreciated!