tried to find out what's causing this. she booted into safe mode. things work there. found out there's no virus.
used safe mode to remove all items from starting up in normal mode. still have the issue.
 
when it boots normally, if she has msn/yahoo start up automatically she can use those, but aside from that, nothing works. start menu and clicking icons results in nothing.
 
this is after an update done two days ago.
 
does anyone else have issues like this?
 
it's win xp home edition
 
edit: adding information to what happened:
initially she complained and i said she should go into safe mode and make sur it's not a virus. then after she got there and ran norton, she said "dammit! it was working fine before the automatic update!" so i asked if xp had system restore, she reset to the day before with no change, so she went to the week before.
that's when i said to remove all the programs from loading via msconfig and see if it'll let her do anything then.