techy help please - very strange problem - quite urgent.

[9]

as much as i hate to start this kind of thread i could do with a little advice.

I just turned on my main PC but instead of booting up normally all the desktop icons were bigger than usual and the colour was bleached out of the background pic, like it had booted in vga mode or somethiing. Also it asked me if i wanted to set a password for opening up windows which it never does. Worst of all though the mouse curser has disappeared so i can't sort it out. I tried plugging in a USB mouse which installed fine but still no fucking curser appeared on the desktop! I don't think its a virus or anything because the pc isn't connected to the internet and i hadn't installed anything recently.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

(I'm writing this from a laptop btw)

[fanny splendid]

It sounds like the mangolassi.drnk virus to me.

Have you been using the services of overseas call centres?

[Ambient Sheep]

I just turned on my main PC but instead of booting up normally all the desktop icons were bigger than usual and the colour was bleached out of the background pic, like it had booted in vga mode or somethiing.

Was the monitor turned on before you turned the PC on?  On some machines if you do this it defaults to a low-resolution startup mode because it doesn't know what the monitor's capable of.  That wouldn't explain the lack of mouse cursor though.

Otherwise it sounds as if it's booted up into safe mode.  Possibly silly question, does it say "Safe mode" in each of the four corners of the screen?  If so I'm afraid I can't really help much, but it sounds like a driver - possibly the display driver - may have been deleted.

[mr rou-rou]

sounds like your mouse.vxd or something similar has gone walkabout.