My wife was running her computer, probably nudged a few keys and now has this problem. The same thing has happened to me, but I forgot how I repaired it.
Folder tasks, other places and details are the 3 boxes appearing on a large box looking a box like a taskbar which takes up about 1/4 of the screen space on the left hand side and it cannot be manipulated in any way.
The regular taskbar is fine, however on the desktop I cannot move icons around manually as they just slip back to where they were ! I have run Hijack this, avg and ad-aware and have not seen any infections.
She has XP Home Edition, with sp-2 and all updates except sp-3 which removed the agp driver. So I uninstalled sp-3 on it yesterday. It has run fine since.
Anyone with an idea.....thanx