Recently, my brothers pc has aquired this message in place of his  desktop
background, "WARNING! a virus has been detected on your machine. Your  system
has been disabled. Please run anti-virus or adware software before using  the
system." This may not be the exact wording but tou get the idea. All other
software and windows components seem to be working fine. He right-clicked the
message and chose "hide message" (or something to that effect) and all his
desktop icons dissappeared. (can still access them from taskbar). Now right
clicking anywhere on desktop does nothing and choosing "show desktop" from  taskbar
does nothing.
 .
 He's running xp sp1 with Avast and Spybot. And I loaded and ran  Hijackthis
but could find nothing listed which "seemed" related to the desktop.  Avast or
Spybot had several entries in system restore but deleting didn't  help.
 If I go to desktop properties the background options are all  "greyed-out"
and searching the windows folder, there is no longer a Desktop  folder
listed... Strange!
 Any suggestions?
 Many Thanks,

Phillip Williams

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