Active Desktop/right Clickin

Hi, my name's Daniel. I recently had a hijacking on my comp, where my active desktop was activated, and an html page warning me of detected adware was made the desktop. I deleted the html files, and thus the bloodred annoyance. I've ran spybot, and deleted several hundred ad/spyware tracks. My problem now is the Active Desktop….I can't right click on the desktop to turn it off, and so my background and all my desktop folders are remaining hidden in the desktop file within Documents & Settings….. How do I turn the blasted thing off…any ideas?

Click Start < Control Panel < Display and on the Desktop tab click Customize Desktop. On the General tab click Restore Defaults. On the Web tab, remove all items that you did not place there.

I would also recommend posting a HijackThis log in the HijackThis Forum to make sure everything bad is indeed gone.


You can download HijackThis from here. Save the file to your desktop.

Double click HijackThis_sfx.exe and select Unzip. When done click "OK".
Close the WinZip self Extractor window.

Navigate to C:\Program Files\HijackThis and double click HijackThis.exe. Scan with HijackThis and post the log in the forum listed above.

Hey..thanks for the input…unfortunately, it didn't turn off the Active Desktop…I've noticed that I can't right click within browser windows…aka file folders on my local drives. Will post to the log forum, and see the results. Any continued input would be greatly appreciated…

CyberGecco, I did the same thing a couple days ago and that blaring red wallpaper was annoying. For you and those here that are helping out, you can read about my adventures at the link below and see what I've done to remedy them, complete with screen caps! It should help out I hope. I want my right-clicking back!
http://tinyurl.com/64wu7

P.S. I have a serious hunch this has something to do with the Policies folder in the registry.

I seem to have been hit with the same problem. None of my installed and "up-to-date" protection software prevented the attack. As mentioned at http://tinyurl.com/64wu7 , the registry entries for my desktop was changed from "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop" to "C:\Desktop". Changing those values brought back my desktop icons, but nothing else.

I noticed that my Display Properties icon in the taskbar was missing. I opened the properties through Control Panel, and went to the Advanded Properties/Options tab, and found the "Enable Taskbar Icon" boxes already checked. I unchecked them, hit "Apply", then went back around and re-enabled them. That did bring back the Icon.

My background wallpaper was also missing. I checked my "Themes" settings in Control Panel/Display, and see that it is listing "Modified Theme" rather than "My Current Theme". Is this normal? When I tried to set it to my own theme, the display went to shades of gray, then returned after a few seconds to normal color. However, "Modified Theme" was still shown as the selected theme, and nothing really happened. I've read elsewhere that a right-clicking problem can be related to the video card driver (in this case an ATI 7000 series AGP card). Perhaps "Themes" are being redirected too? "My Current Theme" is stored as "C:\Documents and Settings\(Username here)\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\Custom".

I am unable to "highlight, cut and paste" anything as well. This is truly frustrating.

Hey guys, I've made some progress and thought I'd share. I'm just copying to you what I wrote in the VirtualDr forums, which can be accessed through that TINYURL link in the above post.
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I was able to get my right-clicking abilities back! There were entries in the registry, in the Policies folders, called NoViewContextMenu. At first I set them to (0) but then deleted them because there's no reason for that to be there. If anybody else is having this problem, try what I did.

1. Start Menu > Run > type REGEDIT and click OK

2. Don't know if this matters but just to be safe, in the left column make sure you have My Computer highlighted so that it will search the entire registry in the next step

3. Bring up the Find box with Control+F and type NoViewContextMenu.

4. Delete it wherever you find it.

You should restart, but for me the contextmenu, which is what comes up when you right-click on files and on the desktop, came back eventually without it. Not right away, but a few minutes later.

I also changed a few more things in the Policies folders, hoping I could unlock the Display Properties box. I changed the background through the registry with no problem, but the Display Properties are still locked.

So my new question is:
Does anybody know of a registry entry that disables the Display Properties? I can get to it, but it won't let me change anything in the Desktop tab.

I've noticed a few other quirks, but don't know if mentioning them will be helpful or not. My desktop is still blank; actually, set to a medium blue. I can't access anything to change that. My original wallpaper, however, flashes on screen for about a second as I log off. Also, none of these problems seem to be present in any of the other user profiles on this computer. When I log on with a different profile, the wallpaper is there, and everything appears to be working as it should. I don't want to give in and simply delete my existing profile though. Thanks for the help so far.

I just got my wallpaper and display properties back at the same time. I used the "Find" feature in regedit to delete all instances pointing to the deleted folder C:\desktop.html. I suppose this has left some other entries behind doing who knows what. Hopefully someone will isolate this and have a better solution soon.