My laptop is infected with some hijacking virus. I can't get the task manager screen to come up and I can't create any restore points.

1. The program starts up fine because I can see the icon on the task bar on bottom right hand side.
2. The task manager screen won't come up when I double click the icon on the task bar.
3. The icon won't display the menu options when I right click on the icon on the task bar.
4. The computer can't create any restore points when installing updates.
5. The "Automatic Restore Points" dialog box under the system protection tab under system properties cannot find any "Available Disks" when searching for the latest restore point. It appears to hang up while "searching" for the latest restore point.

The task manager works fine in safe mode but not in normal mode.

Please help me.

What are you doing to get the task manager up in the first place? For it even to show up for me, I have to try and bring it up in some manner. The task menu item is never there on load up.

Whatever it is, it sounds like that part of your PC is in poor health. Have you tried the usual virus scans etc. I'd also recommend loadnig up Control Panel, going into Programs / Add/Remove Programs (or whatever it's called) and take a look what's there. Is there anything you've installed that could be causing the issues and could be uninstalled?

I wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary to bring up the task manager. It would come up by pressing ctrl-alt-delete and selecting the task manager option or right clicking the task bar and selecting the task manager option. The problem was that the screen would not come up.

You are right. As it turned out it was the print spooler service that was causing the problem and would not let me create restore points nor let me see the task manager screen. I did find that the computer had a trojan virus after I installed the McAfee antivirus suite but I had a very hard time trying to get it to work because it would freeze up at startup. It finally worked after 10 or so attempts but the problem was still there after the infected files were quarantined. I guess the virus corrupted my print spooler exectuable because that was the only thing I found wrong.

Since I knew the task manager worked fine in safe mode I ended up disabeling all the services and startup programs in the MSCONFIG screen and activating 10 services at a time until I noticed the problem come up and then I just narrowed it down from there until I found the culprit. This was a long and painful experience but I learned a little from it.

Thank you for answering my request for help.