running windows 7 suddenly no start button or icons

I've been running a windows 7 partition all semester and suddenly today my start button and all my icons have disappeared. I have one difficulty to add. No matter what I have done my right click and etc don't work so I have to take the long way to do anything. I know this might make it to where no body can help me, but I really need to use my windows partition for my school work. Today I was uninstalling autoCAD (because now there is a mac version) and I needed space for Inventor. It was right after I uninstalled autoCAD that the start button and the icons disappeared. Any amount of help would be appreciated.

You could try checking the screen resolution, it's possible your desktop has expanded & the taskbar has dropped off the bottom of the screen (of course, this shouldn't happen; if your resolution went-up everything should just get smaller, but it's a possibility).

Also, sorry to state the obvious, but have you tried taking your cursor all the way to the bottom of your screen (or whichever edge you had your taskbar on) just to see if it's auto-hiding for some reason?

Yeah I tried all of that. I ended up leaving it alone for a couple of hours and coming back to it. It was fine then. I just don't know if I will always have a couple of hours to wait for it to decide to go back to normal the next time it does that.