No desktop icons/taskbar/mouse pointer & ctrl alt del turns temporary black screen

Hondersons

Reputable
Mar 2, 2015
2
0
4,510
Hello, I would like to preface this by saying that I am aware of a somewhat similar problem others have experienced where the solution is replacing the explorer.exe file, however, this does not apply in my case.

That said, I will try to be as thorough as possible.

A day ago I was cleaning my computer and installed a new cd-drive. During this process I removed 2 memory sticks and blew dust out of the case. After putting everything back and starting up my computer my first issue was a memory stick problem where I had placed it in incorrectly. After I remedied this, I began experiencing what I am still experiencing now, and that is a desktop screen with my saved image with no icons, taskbar, or mouse pointer, as well as no access to my control panel, or windows r commands.

My troubleshooting consisted of running hijack this in safe mode which did not fix my problem.
I tried to do a windows repair but it came up saying windows booted successfully.
I went into the registry to remove my explorer.exe from safe mode as well, also no fix.
I then reformatted my original hard-drive and after it went through the 180ish windows updates it came back to the same problem. At this point I thought it was a hard-drive issue so I tried to format a new hard-drive and I got the same exact problem after the updates. I thought maybe it was the new cd-drive, so I tried disabling it and connecting my old one in, but this also did not fix the issue.

As it stands, I am thinking that one of the 180 windows updates is somehow interfering with my hardware, so I plan to reformat and do 10 updates at a time to see what happens.

I assume it's safe to rule out any hardware issues seeing as how my computer starts up and everything is in working order. I checked the status of my ram while I was doing windows updates to see if they were showing and they were. Safe mode also works. I also don't have a previous back-up, so I can't load from a week or so ago.

Anyway, hopefully that was clear and concise. Thanks in advance for your responses.
 


Hi, One of my home computers has suddenly encountered exactly the same problem.
The only difference is that nobody touched any hardware piece on that computer for a while, which brings me to the assumption that it is possible that windows has updated a certain update that IS indeed conflicting with one of the hardware parts....
Could you please state what hardware pieces you have on your computer, and if you have reached a solution , what helped you?

Thank you!