Vista desktop not appearing (shell problem?)

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Good day to all.

I rebuilt a friend’s Vista Home Premium laptop last fall: new hard drive and a completely fresh OS install. Machine worked fine until recently.

She sent it to me no longer working. The symptoms are: machine appears to boot normally, but the login page does not appear. Instead, all I see is a black screen with a mouse pointer. Mouse pointer moves normally.

The Caps Lock and Num Lock keys toggle their respective LEDs normally.

Its as if the Windows shell is simply not loading.

What I’ve tried so far:

1) mash the F8 key while booting, select “restore last known good configuration”. No change.

2) mash the F8 key while booting, select “Repair Computer”. The machine boots and I get the normal color screen asking me for the username and password. I enter those and the repair utility does its thing. But: it says that all items are OK. The last item in the log is “Root cause found: Boot status indicates that the OS booted normally.”

I’m not sure what to try next. Unfortunately, the owner did not send to me either the OS install disk or the drivers disk. I can get them sent out but that will take several days. I don’t have any Vista install media here – I made a conscious decision to avoid Vista.

What I’m hoping is that someone can offer suggestions that I can do either with the laptop directly or by pulling the hard drive and connecting the drive to one of my XP or Win7 computers.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

dwayne

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I really think you need the Vista disk as I think you may have to boot from the DVD and run a repair install. This will re-install the system files (I believe) and possibly fix the problem. It is entirely passible she has developed a cold on her PC (virus that is). If this is a possibility a format reinstall would probably be less time consuming than attempting to t/s. Good Luck!

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Good day to all.

The symptoms are: machine appears to boot normally, but the login page does not appear. Instead, all I see is a black screen with a mouse pointer. Mouse pointer moves normally.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

dwayne

DwayneR,
Hello…. When i get a “black screen” after booting up it usually has to do with my “Nvidia” (VGA) control settings …Sounds like they somehow were switched to a second monitor …After you boot can you get into your control panel ?:cheers: Regards Fred

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One of the first things I checked was to make sure that the machine was not set to use an external display. Hitting the hot-key combo (Fn + F7) causes the display to blank very momentarily, then return to what it was doing before (mouse pointer on black screen).

Booting into Safe mode has exactly the same results as booting normally: no login screen; movable mouse pointer on black screen.

I was hoping that someone might have a suggestion in terms of connecting the hard drive to one of my other computers, then using a registry editor of some sort that would mount and open the registry on the affected drive so that I could look at key registry values.

Many thanks!

dwayne

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DwayneR,
Hello… When you get the “black screen” what happens if you left click and then input your “log on” ( even though you can’t see it )? Also you can run the HD on another PC if you have the ports and or a USB input.
Regards Fred

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Hi,

Can you boot in safe mode?

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See if How to fix Vista Black Screen of Death[/url] helps.

Joe

--Joe

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See if How to fix Vista Black Screen of Death[/url] helps.

Joe

Many thanks for that link. I truly had NO idea how wide-spread this problem was!

I’ve spent the past couple of days trying many of the things listed on that page as well as some of the things suggested on pages linked to that page.

These include: creating a new Logs directory, running the PrevX utility (which is supposed to check and correct something like 10 or so possible causes of the problem), check the Shell setting in the registry, many other things that I can’t recall right this instant.

I’ve spoken with the owner of the machine and she asked if there was any way that I could install either XP or Win7 on the machine. I just checked the LG website and they do show full driver support for Windows XP, so I think that is the way I’m going to go. The machine’s owner has never liked Vista anyway and now sees this as a golden opportunity to get rid of it.

The worry that I have is that even if I fix this particular problem, who’s to say that it won’t happen again. All those millions of hits in Google when searching out “vista black screen” make me (and her) extremely wary. An OS change seems like a good idea to me as well.

I will take an image of the boot partition before I wipe it, though. That does give me the opportunity to tackle it again sometime in the future.

I truly appreciate all the suggestions that everyone has made. Even though I didn’t fix the problem, your support made it easier and less frustrating.

Many thanks!

dwayne

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Hit the Ctr+Alt+Del keys and see if you can bring up taskmanager.
From taskmanager you should be able to initiate the explorer exe shell and access Windows. :crossfingers:

It’s possible that the user’s profile and explorer shell has become corrupted by
either the user or an infection of someform.

Get the install disks from the owner.

Even if you where able to connect the hard disk from the laptop to your computer
and run a thorough AV/AM scan, you may still need the install disks to repair or reinstall if needed.

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I currently have the same problem on a nephews HP laptop. Normal boot does appear to boot to Windows but you simply can’t see the desktop, only the mouse pointer. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing, or rather it probably does but you can’t see anything. Booting into Safe Mode does work. Updating video drivers did nothing.

What I did eventually find worked is to boot into Safe Mode, go to Control Panel, Users and turn off UAC. Reboot normal and VOILA! Desktop is back.

I’ve been researching this for days and have found nothing to the cause. Yes I did run Avast, Prevx and Malwarebytes scans and found nothing. This system is clean. I also went through every app in Programs and uninstalled anything that was not going to be used. If it were my machine I’d simply leave UAC off but it’s my 16 year old nephews so I need to find the cause and turn UAC back on. Hope this helps…for now.

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If it works in safemode, try the Cleanboot debug procedurestarting in Safe mode.

Jerry

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Not hijacking the thread but in the event it helps the original poster, a cleanboot did not help for me.

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I’d strongly recommend Windows 7 over XP. Just backup her data first and do a clean install. If you have any driver issues most likely a Vista driver will work.

Joe

--Joe

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I think that I will take your advice. I tried installing a retail Win 7 Home Premium Upgrade disc and everything seems to work well. I used the Vista TouchPad and Bluetooth drivers but downloaded the most recent Win 7 video and audio drivers from ATI and Realtek respectively.

It all seems to be working well. I’ll take another image of the boot partition, then install the LG utilities that the owner has asked for. I suspect they will also work OK.

Thanks for the suggestion!

dwayne

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I have a vista laptop and had the same problem a few times, I started the laptop and all appeared normal, then instead of displaying the desktop, the screen went blank. I tried rebooting into safe mode and many other things. I finally just plugged in a monitor into the VGA port and there was the desktop I right clicked the screen to try and switch back to the laptop’s screen, but it said I wasn’t using an external monitor. i set it up to use an external monitor and then switched back to the laptops screen. This finally worked. This has happened several times since and the solution was always the same.

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In my experience dealing with Vista since it came out on many machines, when what you are saying happens:

1) Your boot block is bad. In this case a boot from a Vista disk and repairing boot will fix it.

2) A USB item connected to the computer is stopping it from booting. Disconnect all USB items and try booting again.

3) It has gone into hibernation and as it is a laptop, either crashed or the battery died while in hibernation if on battery only. You need to delete the hibernation file and boot again. I recommend taking the drive out and attaching it to another computer, get rid of that hibernation file and putting it back.

4) You have a rootkit that has gone crazy. You need to go over it with a GOOD antivirus. Everyone has their favourite. In my constant checks and rechecks, AVG free comes in second and Sophos first but Sophos is costly if you have only ONE computer as the price normally includes 3 licences. After checking it with your favourite antivirus, have Malwarebytes anti Malware on your clean system with laptop drive connected to it and check with that for any nasties.

5) You have a ram chip that is partially working. Easy to check if you have one dud ram chip and I guess you know how so I wont go on about it.

6) As others have said, a driver problem, one that is either your graphics chip or not. You can do yourself a favour, here and attach an external monitor while booting. While this rarely helps, on occasion it has given me the answer because SOMETHING has gone wrong in the graphics display and it didnt turn up until an external monitor was attached. You can also try moving the mouse off the borders of the screen. If it goes out of site and out the window next your computer and frightens your cat in the yard, then there is a fair chance that you have an extended display and that you are seeing only part of it.

7) Your user profile is history. Can you boot safe mode with a monitor also attached? You may be able to get in that way or if the profile is hashed, you may be able to logon as Admin and fix it. If you dont have the admin password, you can always boot from a CD from an Ophcrack ISO and get the password that way. Actually, try booting from that anyway. If it works fine it answers some questions for you straight away.

8) You have a physically damaged sector on your hard drive. Easily fixed by doing a full (5 level) check of the laptop hard drive while attached to another computer. Actually, in some cases like yours with Vista, this is the first thing I have done and all worked as it should after that.

9) When all that fails, I always go with a repair from a boot CD or depending on who made the laptop it is sometimes possible to restore Windows to factory condition without killing off any data by booting from the restore partition.

10) When all else fails, I find a sledge hammer cures all! ;-}

Greg.

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In my experience dealing with Vista since it came out on many machines, when what you are saying happens:

1) Your boot block is bad. In this case a boot from a Vista disk and repairing boot will fix it.

I’m not sure, but I don’t think that its a boot block problem. Reason: I can get into Vista’s Repair Console. I don’t think that would be possible if the boot block was bad.

2) A USB item connected to the computer is stopping it from booting. Disconnect all USB items and try booting again.

This is a laptop and there are no external USB devices attached.

3) It has gone into hibernation and as it is a laptop, either crashed or the battery died while in hibernation if on battery only. You need to delete the hibernation file and boot again. I recommend taking the drive out and attaching it to another computer, get rid of that hibernation file and putting it back.

I may try this. I currently have Win 7 running on the machine right now but I’m curious. It doesn’t take Acronis True Image all that long to restore partitions.

4) You have a rootkit that has gone crazy. You need to go over it with a GOOD antivirus. Everyone has their favourite. In my constant checks and rechecks, AVG free comes in second and Sophos first but Sophos is costly if you have only ONE computer as the price normally includes 3 licences. After checking it with your favourite antivirus, have Malwarebytes anti Malware on your clean system with laptop drive connected to it and check with that for any nasties.

Nope – I think the drive is clean. The very first thing I did was pull the drive and attach it to one of my desktops. Both Eset’s NOD32 and AVG Online say the drive is clean.

5) You have a ram chip that is partially working. Easy to check if you have one dud ram chip and I guess you know how so I wont go on about it.

Good suggestion. However, that was either the 2nd or 3rd thing I checked out. I left the memory test run overnight and it made several passes without any errors shown.

6) As others have said, a driver problem, one that is either your graphics chip or not. You can do yourself a favour, here and attach an external monitor while booting. While this rarely helps, on occasion it has given me the answer because SOMETHING has gone wrong in the graphics display and it didnt turn up until an external monitor was attached. You can also try moving the mouse off the borders of the screen. If it goes out of site and out the window next your computer and frightens your cat in the yard, then there is a fair chance that you have an extended display and that you are seeing only part of it.

I didn’t think to try this because the hotkey to select an external monitor behaved as I expected it to. I will try this when I put the original (broken) image back onto the drive.

7) Your user profile is history. Can you boot safe mode with a monitor also attached? You may be able to get in that way or if the profile is hashed, you may be able to logon as Admin and fix it. If you dont have the admin password, you can always boot from a CD from an Ophcrack ISO and get the password that way. Actually, try booting from that anyway. If it works fine it answers some questions for you straight away.

There was absolutely no difference between booting normally or booting into Safe Mode. Same result: black screen with movable white mouse pointer.

8) You have a physically damaged sector on your hard drive. Easily fixed by doing a full (5 level) check of the laptop hard drive while attached to another computer. Actually, in some cases like yours with Vista, this is the first thing I have done and all worked as it should after that.

I have Spinrite 6 and did run it on the drive for a day. No errors found.

This was a brand-new drive last fall – that’s why I had re-installed the OS from scratch. The user used the machine constantly for 5 or 6 weeks before this problem manifested itself.

9) When all that fails, I always go with a repair from a boot CD or depending on who made the laptop it is sometimes possible to restore Windows to factory condition without killing off any data by booting from the restore partition.

Yeah – I would have been able to do that if I had installed the restore partition on the new drive. I had planned to do so and even left space for it – but the owner needed the machine before that got done.

I also normally take an image of the boot partition and save it to the data (D:) partition – but again, did not have time. C’est La Vie.

10) When all else fails, I find a sledge hammer cures all! ;-}

Yeah – reformat and reinstall .

Thanks for the suggestions!

dwayne

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I recently had this same problem with the black screen and cursor, although it was after the user logged in. I was able to get to the task manager, but not the desk stop. I rebooted, pressed F8 and Repair Computer. I then restored to a point when the PC had installed Vista Service Pack 2. There seemed to be something (probably video related) installed on the users computer that did not work well with the Service Pack. After restoring to that restore point, it has worked fine. SP 2 will not be installed on that computer in the future. I am preparing to move that user to Win7.

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I am new to these forums but wanted to post to this thread before I introduce myself. Last week, my grandson, downloaded something he thought beneficial to my daughters Acer Laptop, Vista Home Edition. It was some virus program. No clue why he thought he had to do that. Whatever site he used attached a very difficult virus to every essential file. After hours of trying to find a solution, I decided to copy all their pictures and music files. Had to go to a DOS prompt, access the D: drive (just a partition data drive) move all the data C to D, then go back to C, access my email client, zip them all up and email them to me so I could put them on CDs from my system. Worked like a charm.

Now, I didn’t see this on any of the above posts: Power off the laptop, power on, keep hitting ALT-F10 (only had to hit it once), a screen comes up warning that all data will be overwritten. When the whole thing was through, I brought the laptop back to when she took it out of the box. Put on my virus program, Firefox. Eliminated Norton, what a mess that is! Put a note on her wall above her desk: DO NOT DOWNLOAD ANYTHING. ONLY USE FIREFOX. NO INSTALLING ANYTHING or UNINSTALLING anything unless you call me. My grandson is 17. I think he heeded my warning. No calls yet.

I thank my lucky stars everyday for this Mac Mini and the programs I have installed on it. I use XP PRO, which turns out to be very stable for me. MacOS 10.something on the other partition, which I hardly ever access just because new and different isn’t up my alley right at this time.

I hope this helps others. Was a laptop-saver for me.

Jann

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Good day to all.

I rebuilt a friend’s Vista Home Premium laptop last fall: new hard drive and a completely fresh OS install. Machine worked fine until recently.

She sent it to me no longer working. The symptoms are: machine appears to boot normally, but the login page does not appear. Instead, all I see is a black screen with a mouse pointer. Mouse pointer moves normally.

The Caps Lock and Num Lock keys toggle their respective LEDs normally.

Its as if the Windows shell is simply not loading.

What I’ve tried so far:

1) mash the F8 key while booting, select “restore last known good configuration”. No change.

2) mash the F8 key while booting, select “Repair Computer”. The machine boots and I get the normal color screen asking me for the username and password. I enter those and the repair utility does its thing. But: it says that all items are OK. The last item in the log is “Root cause found: Boot status indicates that the OS booted normally.”

I’m not sure what to try next. Unfortunately, the owner did not send to me either the OS install disk or the drivers disk. I can get them sent out but that will take several days. I don’t have any Vista install media here – I made a conscious decision to avoid Vista.

What I’m hoping is that someone can offer suggestions that I can do either with the laptop directly or by pulling the hard drive and connecting the drive to one of my XP or Win7 computers.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

dwayne

I had this happen to me recently. My brother told me to: turn off the PC, unplug it, take the battery out, then push the start button to turn it on. I put it all back together and low and behold it started up fine. I forgot what he said it was called but I believe it was something to do with static buildup? It worked for me when I had that problem…maybe yours could be as simple a fix too? Good luck! Jo

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KB2296011 Causes blank screen in Windows Vista Home Premium

I had a similar problem that was related to Windows security update KB 2296011. Update would install with no errors either through Microsoft update OR manually. With the patch installed it would give a black screen w/cursor. The patch had problems in some Laptops. To check if this your problem, boot into safe mode using F8 then turn off the UAC control in control panel, than do a normal boot. If it your computer boots into the desktop, then your problem is with the KB 229611 update. Remove the update using add/remove programs, then hide the update in Microsoft update so that you don’t get asked to install the update again. Microsoft does not believe it is their problem.

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KB2296011 Causes blank screen in Windows Vista Home Premium

I had a similar problem that was related to Windows security update KB 2296011. Update would install with no errors either through Microsoft update OR manually. With the patch installed it would give a black screen w/cursor. The patch had problems in some Laptops. To check if this your problem, boot into safe mode using F8 then turn off the UAC control in control panel, than do a normal boot. If it your computer boots into the desktop, then your problem is with the KB 229611 update. Remove the update using add/remove programs, then hide the update in Microsoft update so that you don’t get asked to install the update again. Microsoft does not believe it is their problem.

UAC can be turned back on after removing KB 2296011

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Been reading alot of post….have desktop with same issue.. though it was a powerplug problem at first (has 4 dog’s &one son) realized soon that it wasent comp came on but it”s saying no signal to screen tryed the fixes iread about in post ouly worked for awile then when comp tryed to restart or sleep mode set it off again.. well then it didnt come on atall even with the tearing down too just part and rebuilding it…… what can you say just grr……it was back. well.. got board one one fine day tryed to get the darn thing working heres what worked for me but it only temp but has worked every time so far hold power button until comp turn off… wait 2 min then as you hold power button press f12 for boot menu start windows normaly…. SCREEN COMES ON woot woot will say on UNTIL it trys to restart or go into sleep mode repeat above steps… SCREEN comes on lol comp still useable to a point….but i swiched back to XP(old comp) My thoughts are…it has somthing to do with a start up reg is messing with signal to screen on restart-or sleepmode is started

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KB2296011 tryed this only works for awile. black screen comes back….

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