Can someone tell me why my Dell XPS 400 which has been working fine for years all of a sudden won't load my personal settings. (Windows XP)
It boots normally but when it says it's loading my personal setting after I put in my password, it shows a completely empty desktop.
I mean only the background picture is there.

I'm getting to this point using the windows task manager clicking new task to browse.
All my desktop items are all there.
I'd like to somehow get to my control panel to delete a free anti virus that may be the cause of this. (Avast) (also Google chrome)
Any help would be appreciated.

Ah, I see I left a few heads scratching.
Well, I managed to right click on the Avast using the task manager to delete.
Of course this says it will only delete the icon not the program, but it gave me a link to go directly to add or remove programs which I had no other way of doing.
So I removed it from the computer, reboot for the sixth time, and all is back to normal.
Hope it helps someone else.

When your computer boots to a blank desktop (no icons, no start-bar, etc.. ) CTRL + ALT + DEL opens Task Manager, click to run new task, type explorer.exe this will load desktop and start bar...

When profiles can't load it's usually an error 1500 or 1508 which points to limited system resources ie: memory

You might have a program that's leaking memory...

Check event viewer for specific error ID and go from there!