Hi,
Im new to linux, and have just installed mandrake 9.1 on my laptop, however after the bootloader, the lightblue background[?] loads up, and nothing else, no icons, no taskbar, etc.
Please help

The laptop specs are as follows:
Advent 7036, Pentium4 2.6ghz, 512 ddr333 ram, 40gig hdd, geforce fx5300 64meg.

You talking about the boot manager or the desktop enviroments, a bootloader would not have icons or taksbar etc... in it,just a choice of what OS to load (windows,linux..) Depeneding on you setup it might also be setup to boot into a GUI logon screen.

If the problem is the boot manager, then you have not made a config file or have not edited it correctly, if it's the desktop enviroment (meaning you see the computer boot up the kernel and so forth) then we need to know what desktop your tring to load and your XF86Config file might also be helpful.

n/m i sorted it.
when installing it selected something by default and i changed it to 'nvidia' and for some strange reason that appeared to be the problem.