Windows 10 Black Screen with Full Mouse Control

[Taylor_31]

My Grandfather's having some computer trouble and I've been trying to troubleshoot it, but haven't been able to fix it yet. He has a tower that's a couple years old with a dual core pentium and the latest Windows 10 update.

So here's the issue. After browsing the internet a bit the screen goes black and there is still control of the mouse. Pushing Ctrl+Alt+Del seems to get you out of it and returns the screen to a normal state. The issue isn't after boot, logging in works fine. He usually uses Internet Explorer.

Here's the fixes I've tried. I ran MalwareBytes and McAfee just to make sure there wasn't a virus or something. I was looking at the task manager and there were pretty much just windows tasks and the web browser, all using normal amounts of memory and cpu. I removed and reinstalled the graphics driver to make sure that wasn't the issue as well (just has integrated graphics). Any other ideas would be appreciated, thanks. Also feel free to ask for more information if it's needed.

 

[Colif]

is desktop crashing or just IE? does the taskbar vanish?

Its not a screen saver as I assume it can happen while you using PC?

I assume he doesn't have 100's of extra toolbars running - https://www.winhelp.us/internet-explorer-11-troubleshooting.html

does it happen in Edge?

 

[Taylor_31]

is desktop crashing or just IE? does the taskbar vanish?

Its not a screen saver as I assume it can happen while you using PC?

I assume he doesn't have 100's of extra toolbars running - https://www.winhelp.us/internet-explorer-11-troubleshooting.html

does it happen in Edge?

Seems like the whole desktop is crashing, and yes the taskbar does dissapear. The whole screen goes black. I made sure there weren't any toolbars installed. I'm not sure if the crash happens outside of IE, I'll have to find that out next. I checked his screensaver settings to makes sure it wasn't set to like 1 minute and that was all he was seeing as well lol.

 

[Colif]

search cortana for Reliability and have a look at the history of PC and see what it reports - I often forget it exists

try this:
right click start button
choose command prompt (admin)
type SFC /scannow and press enter
once its run, copy/paste this next command into same window
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

DISM cleans the files SFC uses to clean windows, so if SFC had found files it couldn't fix, re run it and then restart PC

 

[Taylor_31]

The SFC scan didn't find anything, but the reliability check said windows live photo viewer had been crashing when the screensaver was trying to activate. I don't know why that is, but I disabled it so hopefully that fixes the issue. I'll pick your answer as the solution in a couple days if the problem goes away now, Colif. Thanks for the help!

 

[Colif]

Windows Live photo viewer is old, it came with win 7 and as far as I can tell, is replaced by the new photos app.

here is a fix for that very behavior in Win 7

Windows 7

Close Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Click Start, click Run, type%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Photo Gallery, and then click OK.
Delete any existing instance of "OLD_Pictures.pd4" and "OLD_Pictures.pd5."
Locate and then right-click "Pictures.pd4" or "Pictures.pd5."
Rename "Pictures.pd4" to "OLD_Pictures.pd4" or rename "Pictures.pd5" to "OLD_Pictures.pd5."

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/944221

If that doesn't work, might have to get him to use the photos app instead. Its probable the screen saver uses same images as Windows live photo viewer but is written to work with the new photos app that came with win 10. Many of the old windows live programs don't work so well on 10, the mail app gives my mum problems sometimes. She will have to learn the new email app soon when we buy her a new PC.