Windows 7: Windows cannot find my desktop after logon

Good day to all. I would appreciate input / help to address the problem I’m having with Win 7 after I logon to my account. Here are some details of my system and the “problem”.

1)- Hardware: Notebook, MSI U230 Light , CPU Athlon Neo MV-40, RAM 2G , HDD 250 GB
Operating system: Windows 7 Home Premium. This is the only OS on the notebook.

2)- The problem occurs in about 10% of all logon attempts – it does not occur all the time. This is how / when the problem occurs:

3)- Win 7 starts successfully and icons for my two profiles (G2 , G-msi) appear. I logon to my account (G2) and then see the “welcome” screen, and after a very long period of searching by the system, windows reports that it cannot find my desktop. The Win 7 notice indicates that a file may have been moved , or that the file may have been on a removable media. (Note: However, I did NOT delete, edit, or remove any file(s) or the HDD).

4)- On one occasion, after this problem occurred, windows provided me with a “temporary account” and desktop and indicated any files that I generated would not be saved when I logged-off. On another occasion when I experienced this problem my desktop wallpaper was replaced with a blue screen Window 7 default. Each time when Windows 7 has been unable to find my desktop, I have shutdown and rebooted and subsequently managed to logon successfully.

5)- It may be of interest to note that all wallpapers / backgrounds used to “personalize” my desktop came from those available in Windows 7 Home Premium version.

My knowledge of Windows is probably that of an "advanced newbie". Your input / help toward resolving this problem would be much appreciated.

George2006

i remember having this problem too at one point with my old pc, not sure what is the cause or how i fixed it but this should help
cheers mate
"Windows cannot find" errors: How to solve them? - a knol by Konstantin Artemev

I Had this problem once it was because i didnt shut down properly.
You may want to restore to factory settings or to a restore point and see if that helps.

Thank you Samunition for the suggestion. As I indicated earlier, the problem occurs about 10% of the time. Restoring my system to original factory settings to "see what happens" is a drastic measure, as it would wipe out several applications I've loaded, and painstakingly updated. I doubt whether I can Restore to an earlier date, since I'm also running Norton AV, and in the past ( in Win XP) Norton has blocked restore attempt by Windows. Many thanks,

George2006