Win98 explorer page fault

Last night I downloaded a couple of media players to try out, didn't like them so uninstalled them. After doing that I couldn't open anything so just shut down windows and rebooted.
My reboot went through all the system checks etc, past the loading windows screen, my wallpaper appeared an then error message " explorer caused an invalid page fault in module explorer.exe at 0167:00401f31". I'm left with just my wallpaper, no taskbar, no icons, nothing.
If I hit Ctrl Alt Del there are no programs listed. This also happens when I try to launch in safe mode.
I can't get into explorer or anything else at all, any ideas?.