no desktop icons, system stalls

Sometimes when I boot up, the desktop fails to display any of the icons; the
background come up ok, but no icons. The mouse still moves ok too. A
ctr-alt-del would reveal that not all the processes are loaded yet (maybe at
the most, just two). Sometimes, when the same thing happens, the tasklist
would reveal that "msgsrv32 - [not responding]" ..and sometimes killing that
process would kickstart the bootup to resume OK. But lately, the former
situation seems to be happening (just a blank desktop, and no msgsrv32 in
memory to kill!)

Elsewhere, I read that maybe this problem has to do with a corrupted
ShellIconCache cache. ??? But this bootup problem seems intermittent;
sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. pSearching for ShellIconCache
issues, I found one article at MSKB that had suggested to add the registry
variable "Max Icon Cache" and make the value 2000 (MS writes that the
default would be 500). Is this latter method the stragedy the rest of my
WinMe collegues use?

I am puzzled why this problem seems to now occur more frequently. Have
bnot/b been adjusting the resolution, colour setting (16bit .vs. 32bit)
or the icon colour for years!