explorer.exe keeps restarting

my computer boots up fine, however when it gets to the desktop, the desktop starts refreshing/restarting (not the entire system).
All of my icons and the start menu down at the bottom all goes blank and then comes back and then everything goes blank again.this cycle repeats every 5 seconds. Sometimes explorer.exe doesn't even load, so i have to go into task manager and manually have explorer.exe run but then it goes away again as stated above.

I did the following myself:

• I ran ad-aware and cleared all the infections. I am running a virus scan and it says i have got 2 trojans: oaif.exe (SHeur.ADXU) and rtfjiqam.exe (Generic_c.FPC). they were healed…same problem.
• i tried running the computer in safe mode and the desktop still refreshes every 10 seconds. I tried doing system restore, but it doesn't matter what point i choose it says system restore incompelete.
• The Dell tech said it could be a user file/settings issue, so he created another account for me…didn't solve problem.

Even dell tier 3 support can't help me. all they said was im going to have to restore my entire system to factory settings which means all my data will be lost (which i cannot afford). I tried transferring all the data to an external HDD however before the copying/transferring process even starts the desktop is refreshing so it wont do it. Now i am out of options and am coming to you guys for help. i heard you were quick and good. Please help.

i have finals tomorrow…please help me.

My computer is a dell laptop inspiron 600m, 1GB Mem, 80GB HDD and running windows xp home with sp2.

hi,

dont know if i will be of much help. if you have run(updated) ad aware and your antivirus thats a start- would it be possible to get a hjt log posted? could you do a online scan?

I tried transferring all the data to an external HDD

if its a virus/worm its possible to infect the external hard drive

rather than copying the entire drive you could just transfer stuff you dont want to lose, in case you reformat the HD. most of this stuff would be in your user profile/my documents etc.transfer may go faster this way. get off what you need on to the ext. hd, then reformat.

shelf life