Windows 7 - Aero Problem

Hi
A few days ago i was plaing a game wolfenstein. Everything was fine as usual. then suddenly the game froze. Completly surprised as this never happened before i turned the game off using the task manager. the screen flashed a few times and then i was on my desktop screen. what i saw was the bottom taskbar was like the one in windows 98. the old beige coloured ugly taskbar. i tought somthing went wrong so ill just put that back to normal. i went into the personalisation menu but when i wanted to select my theme.. there was none. the theme square where u choose your themes was blank. so i clicked on the transparency and other aero effects trouble shooter and all i got was that
the themes service is not working.......not fixed
Desktop window manager is disabled......detected

i saw alot of forum. tried force starting it and loads of other solutions but it didnt work

please help.

Maciek

check out this thread, very similar issue probably due to performance
force aero on?

tanx for the reply.
Yes it is quite similar but we also get the same result. i tried that "force start aero" before but it didnt do nothin at all. not even a flash on the screen

im probobly gonna have to reinstall the system but i dnt want to loose all my data

any ideas?