Windows XP only showing wallpaper. Why isn't anything else appearing?

First of all, Windows XP is really slow when it says “Loading your personal settings.” It eventually gets past that after like 10 minutes and finally the wallpaper shows up. . . .but no icons or taskbar. I try doing CTRL+ALT+DEL and nothing shows up. Can’t right click either. I tried going into safe mode when it boots for some reason nothing happens. Is it F8 I have to press? And when exactly do I press it?

Oh, wait, the usual options showed up right now when I pressed CTRL+ALT+DEL. I wanted to go to task manager because I found out you can take out some things to make it run faster, but not even the task manager is showing up, or at least it’s super slow too.

This laptop’s been around since 2008. My mom’s using it now. Obviously I’m on another laptop online asking for help. It’s been working fine, supposedly, just last night. And now this morning it was just super slow.