System restore hung, incomplete opsys load

My wife has tried to do a system restore on her computer, it hung half way through and she restarted the computer manually !!.........doh !!
She now gets XP to load, it loads fine and briefly flashes the start logo on the bottom left before going to a windows desktop background and nothing else.
I can ctrl+alt+del into the task manager but this is all ??
can anyone suggest anything other than a repair or re-install ??
cheers