Computer help forum: I've lost my desktop icons, desktop wallpaper, etc.Need help

Since you didn't say what version of Windows you're running, I'm not going to be as specific as I'd like to be, but click the Start button and look in the upper right corner of the start menu to see if it has your user name there. If something happens to corrupt the files associated with your ID, windows can assign a temporary ID with the results you're reporting. If this is the case, you can create a new ID and copy the undamaged files and shortcuts from the old one. I'd normally give specifics, but since I don't know what version of Windows you have, I'm unable to do that here.

Good luck.

Just out of curiosity have you looked to see if your homepage has changed? If it is not showing what you normally use, MSN.com, Mozilla or whatever you normally use for browsing, it could, as a prior poster stated become corrupt or redirected. I saw that you had done some scans but I didn't see any anti virus package(s) mentioned. A quick and easy test for malware/trojan infection would be to just download Malwarebytes, then boot the system into Safe Mode With Networking, run a MWB scan, when the scan is completed, click SHOW RESULTS, if anything nefarious appears, choose the removal option. If, as I mentioned before, your homepage in Internet Options is not what you normally see, highlight backspace, re input your normal address, msn, mozilla or whatever you use, hit apply and see if things normalize. These are just a couple of failry simple things to do when trying to ferret out this type of issue. Another thing you could try is a rollback to an earlier time to see if that might bring things back to normal but I'd suggest checking the other items first, including a MWB scan.