Windows 7 black screen no desktop icons

Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? Resolved my issue. Clear instructions. Easy to follow. No jargon. Pictures helped. All my programs, settings, data, etc. My recommendation if you have fix the problem with some of the simple fixes listed here is just do the in place upgrade.

You'll save yourself a lot of troubleshooting and wasted time. My problem is that I cannot access safe mode. My monitor immediately goes to sleep upon booting up the system. I have owned my new HP m desktop for approximately a month now and this just started happening about a week ago. My operating system is Windows 7. I would appreciate any help I can get. Thank you in advance for taking the time to possibly resolve my problem.

Because I have just taken delivery of 3 Alienware laptops within 3 days As it was Nvidia graphics card thought it may be a driver conflict but no it was joined some one week later by the 2nd Alienware with different software and a Radeon Graphics card.

When the third machine finally arrived it took less than a week to crash out this time it had a different I7 processor so having ruled out Graphics cards and processors and all running different software the only conclusion we can come to is it is the operating system which itself was fine until the updates installed.

We concluded that the first having been manually updated was the first to reach the 'patch of death' followed by the second on auto update As a Scientist I proffer the following If Newspaper reports are anything to go by then by their own admission MS admit that the problem also occurred in Windows XP, Vista etc this acknowledges they are aware of the problem however have not been prepared to fix nor publicise it So much then for those of us who are faced with the hours sorting out a possible cure we are left very much to sort the problem out on our own albeit having paid Microsoft for the privelege of so doing The only conclusion I can come to is that given the failure of uptake for Vista the company don't want to blight W7 with bad publicity rather preferring to show that all in the garden was rosy.

Windows 7 like most things made today suffers from the modern curse where the style of the product is more important than its substance. Wow, such a long thread Anybody care to tag which ones resolved their problem? FreeTech cesabarre. I fixed my by modifying the Shell key right click Shell leave rest but on value data: explorer. Nice team work. Free Tech. I scrolled quickly posts and made a conclusion that the issue is related to standalone computers.

All W7 have the same issue. I have the same problem occur after a windows update. Is this really a joke? A brand new out of the box system with a single update and then suddenly a black screen, no mouse, no keyboard both wireless. Just before this happened I had an issue with the video settings - they were automatically resetting to a lower resolution. So I am assuming this is a video issue related to the this crappy OS. Just as a side vent: Windows XP a very reliable OS is hands and shoulders above this shinny box garbage.

I do not think it is due to virus or malware as the machine is new. Initially, on day 5since I received it, I found it only have black screen while mouse icon was shown. I can start task manager - but I can not start explorer from task manager. I tried to restore the system to a previous point, there are 4 points, each after a microsoft update. But my restoration fails each one at last step.

I decided to make a clean installation -- While Dell technical support seems a little scared at this idea. I make a clean installation, so everything is OK initially, but I found the network adpater and wireless and Broadcom USH and an unknown driver were not installed. So I download the drivers from dell website and installed the driver.

After restart, the system become worsen as after the system is powered up, it enter the black screen and without mouse icon. I can not even make another clean reinstallation, after the "Loading files" of restoration process, it entered black screen again without mouse. I have the same problem. I ran Malwarebytes on my PC and it didn't detect anything.

I currently have Norton Internet Security installed. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate. In this instance you logon as per normal till you're the black screen with only the cursor. Absolute genius! Personally the prevx fix did not work for me and i was almost out of options before i found this site. I am using windows 7 and i would get a normal login screen, after logging in i would get black screen, no taskbar, no start menu etc.

The general info for checking out your registry keys is a good idea. I followed the instructions and all my registry keys were in order as far as i could tell. The one thing that did resolve my problem was going to task manager, if i had access to the start menu it would be more simple.

So i just give you instructions on running cmd prompt as an admin from task manager. Run this command by hitting enter. Latitude E about 4 months old, turned off Friday in doc, now boots to black screen, white cursor. I can see my restore from a known good time and I can't restore it from rstcui.

Better not have shipped the disk like this cause that's freaking embarassing if you did. Seems like this is happening to a lot of people since around the end of Jan It is different than the other issue with prevx is given as the fix. Don't listen to anyone else here no offense but I was looking for a problem of my own with a game I have and saw yours on google I have this problem sometimes too.

You said that the task manager screen showed up? From there, go to processes and find explorer. End the process and then find File. From there, go to New Task Run Press Enter. Your desktop will now show up. Remember this as this problem might happen again. The step are as follows to make sure :. Hi i had the same problem.

Here's another "me too, me too," but I haven't seen anyone address what I've observed yet. Last weekend Feb 28, I opened my laptop and saw that Windows updates had downloaded and the computer needed to restart. I restarted, and then had this black screen problem. Black screen on boot after Windows 7 splash, no login option. Restarted in Safe Mode, system started ok, rebooted, went to black screen again. After getting past the initial frustration, I restarted in Safe Mode again, went to System Restore, and restored to the point before the Windows "critical" update.

So far so good, laptop booted just fine. Now, move to today, March 8, Another notice that a Windows critical update had been installed and the computer needed to be restarted. Hesitantly, I did so. I could not, not matter how many times I tried, get past the black screen Again, after getting past my very real frustration, I pressed F8 on login and went to the "repair your computer" option. This did not help. I tried again, selecting System Recovery this time.

I selected the point before the first one. No luck. Went through it all again, selected the pont before the second one, and this time had success. So, I say all this to ask the question Ending explorer. The directions from the prevx fix for the run command to directly download and run the prevx fix does not fix the issue. No popups come up so I'm not even certain that is completely installing. I can then download the prevx file that way and click on it to run. Nothing happens, restart does nothing.

So I can't browse files on my computer. I then have to reopen task manager to kill the locked one. Booting from the W7 backup disk and running the repair tool does not work. It says something was repaired, but upon restart we're back to the black screen of death.

I do not have a restore point to back date to so that doesn't work. Even though they should exist. This solution from another source was successfully completed as in the steps worked but it still didnt fix my issue. What helped for me is described at the end of my thread "After SP1: no more hardware accelerated opengl only opengl in software mode? For me, uninstalling my AGP chipset driver and having Windows reinstall it automatically was the definitive solution. Of course, other folks may be in a different situation and not even use an old AGP video card and still get that problem The quickest way to resolve the screen issue is to log in as the system administrator local administrator.

Add yourself to the users group, even if you are in the administrators group. Log out of the local administrator account and back in as yourself and the system works perfectly. Add me to the list of frustrated black screen victims.

My case is a bit unusual in that I have multiple users set up. Only the administrative user's account went to black screen, the other users were fine. System restore was of no use, disk scans and antivirus scans showed no errors. Ctrl-Alt-Delete to open the task manager and manually ending the explorer. My cause turned out to be a power saver utility provided by my motherboard manufacturer.

Uninstalling that fixed the black screen issue. That program has been installed for months, all I can figure is that something in Win 7 SP1 conflicted with it when I tried adjusting it. Moral of the story is to undo any changes you made recently and not rely on System Restore to catch them all. Only your solution work. I am stuck with the black screen and curser. It is completely black and only mouse curser which can be moved.

I tried to go into Repair Computer Option and ran Start up repair, It said there is no problems found. But the next time I login the sam blcak screen and here at the repair area, nothing has changed to registry.

I read so many articles in the past 4 days and tried load hive and try to change the key from cmd. Can you please please help. I have few important configurations done in that system like outlook with 4 mail configured and it has 15k emails in it.

This is just the example of a painfull situation that i am in. Please help. The issue happened wihen I did a force shutdown when the computer was unresponsive after showing desktop. I've recently been blessed with this black screen on Windows 7 Pro and have read this entire thread for a solution.

I'm on a basic Latitude 13 laptop with solid state drive. I can issue no keyboard commands or clicks. I can only move the pointer around. I've disconnected ethernet cable and disabled wireless. All versions of Safe Mode have the same black screen result. When the hard drive is reinstalled, same result. In my case, a malware made this changed in registry. In process of cleaning my laptop and bringing it to normal state i.

I may have found a solution to this problem, well atleast in a domain environment. We have four PC's running Windows 7 Ent and three of the machines are booting to the black screen after login, i opened task manager and ended the windows startup script process and bam, the desktop loaded as normal, so the script we are using thats comming from our server running Windows Server is not compatible with Windows 7 causing the black screen at login, hope this helps those of you in an domain environment.

This is more cheating around the problem then really fixing it, but here's how I did it. Quite easy:. Tab 'Actions': New I just formated my hp laptop which had xp, to windows 7 prof and i kinda get the same problem and already tried the f8 solution. My laptop has an Nvidia Gforce grafics card and after i log in my account, after a sort period of time i get a black screen although the laptop still works for example i can see the hard drive work and the online radio doesn't stop.

Whats even funnier, if i connect a second screen everything works fine but i get kinda dizzy with 2 screens on my face and that can't be the only solution. Immediately, upon reboot, the system functioned entirely normal. At that point, I installed the drivers for the new board.

I will be installing the drivers for the new video card next. Everything seemed fine, so I restarted in normal mode.

The system is working just fine. I'm not sure that the disabling the Memory Remap Feature was the key, but it certainly worked in this case.

Maybe someone smarter than me could use this bit of information and determine what was happening. I spent a couple of days fooling with this and I am relieved that it's now working. Thank You!!!! I finally got my computer up and running!

My screen was all black and there was no toolbar, the only thing there was the mouse pointer. Office Office Exchange Server. Not an IT pro? Windows Client. Sign in. United States English. Ask a question. Quick access. Search related threads. Remove From My Forums.

Answered by:. Archived Forums. Windows 7 Miscellaneous. Use this forum to discuss miscellaneous issues that cannot be covered in any other Windows 7 forum. Sign in to vote. Wednesday, November 18, PM.

I fixed this issue, I too had the same problem. Here is how I did it. That's it If you do not have the system restore points, try startup repair. Sunday, January 31, PM. This isn't an authoritative answer - I've just had this problem, sifted through the initial bogus media coverage, found a solution, and started speculating on the real cause. Here's a workaround for the problem, though this company mis-diagnosed the problem it wasn't an ACL problem.

I appreciate that they are helping, but they should fully disclose their fix so at least advanced users can have confidence in their good intentions. Sounds somewhat plausible, but the fishy part is what caused that? I log in, get a black screen, and Windows never proceeds to setting up my desktop, etc ie, Windows never launches explorer.

Running the fixing tool from Prevx did solve the problem, however their diagnosis for the cause of the problem was wrong their initial hypothesis was the ACL's were incorrect and implied Windows Update patches broke it, but that was wrong. They followed up with the non-null-terminated string hypothesis.

Before running Prevx's tool, the registry key existed, RegEdit visually displayed the expected value explorer. Yet, of course, I couldn't successfully log in. Sounds like either random corruption, or more likely, something wanted to run something when Windows boots then incorrectly undid their change to the registry.

Operating under that hypothesis, I ran Forefront on Wednesday using the current signatures, but it didn't report anything. That may not spot a novel virus or rootkit, of course. Another wild guess - perhaps the act of installing certain classes of patches could cause the problem, due to a hypothetical bug in Windows Update.

Windows Update does something on boot up to configure patches, and it looks like this happens after login but before Explorer is running. Perhaps Windows Update itself could be editing this registry key to replace the shell with another program that configures patches or options to explorer.

If that's how it works which is a big guess , then maybe when WU restores the registry key value to explorer. Of course, I would have expect to see a bad value for this reg key in RegEdit if this were the case. I didn't - perhaps there were some unprintable characters in the string, or I've empirically shot down my own wild guess. Note - my problem occurred on a Windows 7 Ultimate machine that was upgraded from Vista Ultimate.

Perhaps something during upgrade may have introduced some registry corruption that didn't show up until another value in the registry was changed later? If that works, that could help confirm the cause and allow us to give standalone instructions for a fix that we can have more confidence in as opposed to telling people to run an exe from a third party.

Friday, December 4, AM. I had the same problem, until a few minutes ago. My problem was that I had a NAS box set up on my local network, and 3 drives mounted and mapped the the Windows machine. I was getting ready to reinstall, when I tried rebooting the machine without networking in safemode.

Problem: Windows explorer was trying to mount these and map them, but timed out a dozen times or so, ending in a malfunctioning explorer. Test: Pull out ethernet, or turn off router before login, see if it helps, if it does, use fix. If it doesn't, this was not the issue and I cannot help.

Fix: Restart whatever machine you've got mapped to your machine, or turn it off, it's gotta need some repair. Saturday, January 30, PM. I experienced this problem today after installing an application called "Neatscan to Office 1. The program appeared to install correctly and documents could be scanned into Office programs. System restore to a point a couple of hours before the install, fortunately, corrected the problem. Watch what you are installing. Neatscan claims Vista compatibility, but does not appear to want to play nice with Win7.

Tuesday, January 26, PM. I'm on Windows 7 Ultimate, a brand new install not an upgrade. There was a lot of "press" online, even from reputable technical sources, around this past Thanksgiving about prevx's claim and that it was a hoax and maybe even dangerous.

I held off for a couple of weeks, hoping to see Microsoft come out with some sort of statement acknowledging that our experiences were real and at least begin working on a solution. I never saw one. I eventually decided to repeat what Brian had discovered and done, running the prevx. I haven't had the problem since and it's been almost two months. Based on this, I recommend others try it too. My thanks to Brian's experiment and recommendation.

Oh, the things you can think up if only you try! This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread. I have the same question Report abuse. Details required :.

Cancel Submit. Vinod N. How can I solve this permanently? The coding cat. It may be something to do with your out-of-date Windows version version 7. I would recommend upgrading to Windows Yes No. Not Helpful 11 Helpful 1. Include your email address to get a message when this question is answered.

You can type the commands in lower case letters. Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0. Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0. After completing each step properly, you can safely close all the programs opened for the purpose. Getting no error after entering command in CMD is a sign of a successful completed command. Submit a Tip All tip submissions are carefully reviewed before being published. Do not kill any other process except explorer. You Might Also Like How to.