Of exploding windows

So yesterday... Upon reaching home, I did the usual stuff... Locked the door, took off shoes, etc, and flipped on Resurrection. After I came out from my shower and went to her, what greeted me, was the wallpaper. That was all. No icons, no task bar, nothing. Ok... I thought, giving it the 3 finger salute. It's happened before, I'll just run explorer manually from task manager. Clicked run, and typed down explorer. Bing. Error. Can't find the resource. Blink. Huh. Typed down the whole path. Still the same... Typed in c: same error. Wth! Restarted... Also the same ... Was feeling traumatised now. Booted to last good config. No luck there. Finally managed to safe boot. Turned off all the services, no dice. Created new user, same... In fact, it actually got worse. I couldn't click on certain tabs in task manager. Doing that would cause task manager to disappear. Very traumatised, I returned to safe mode and poked arnd. No weird processes... Registry looks fine... No spy ware... Virus scan is clean... I had a gut feeling it was my firewall, as it was the most recent thing that I changed, but I've booted with the new version before, and I'd booted with both anti virus and firewall off... Well, I finally came across an article mentioning the same thing happening to Vista with the same anti virus (avast) and firewall (comodo). Nothing on desktop, can't run anything on task manager. So I uninstalled the firewall, and it worked! Yay! ... Now give me my 2+ hours and undo my trauma -_-