very suspicious thing happening on my PC

I am running windows XP, and lately strange things have been happening on my PC

Desktop icons just up and disappear. The only one I have noticed doing this consistently is my shortcut for internet explorer (IE). When this happens, it the IE shortcut is also removed from my start menu. I believe other icons have disappeared from my desktop as well, because every so often I notice an empty space on my desktop where an icon look like it used to be. It it hard to tell which ones however, because by the time I notice, they are already gon, of course.

My computer also seems slower than it should be at times

I know this all sounds like I have some sort of spyware or virus running on my system, but I have run numerous system scans with Ad-aware and Norton, and come up empty handed.

This is kind of worrying me, so if anyone knows what might be going on, please share the wisdom!

 

Try this:

1. Open the Control Panel (Click Start then Control Panel. Now make sure you are viewing in Classic mode). Double-click the Display icon.
2. On the Desktop tab, click on Customise Desktop
3. Under the Desktop Cleanup option, remove the tick from the box which says 'Run desktop cleanup wizard every 60 days'
4. Finally, click OK

Or this:

When you close a window and the computer hesitates while windows "refreshes" all of the Desktop Icons, it is because the ShellIconCache file has reached it's limit of 500 entries.

To stop this run Regedit and open the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer and create a new string value. Name it MaxCachedIcons and then set the value to 2000.