Friends please answer as many questions as u wish or know. Its important for me to repair the problem.

ITS

On my friends (Who is far from me now), HP laptop after logon in Windows Vista , a black screen appears. NO desktop nothing. A blank screen with mouse cursor.

What i did:

As some sites said, in recovery console, i typed regedit, then registry editor appeared, there i check for the following key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

in shell value, i heck it was mentioned:

cmd.exe /k start cmd.exe

i got that changed to explorer.exe.

Now, when the system restarted, my desktop is there, but no internet connection.

My question:

1. What caused that value to change? is it that Windows Vista uses cmd.exe for shell? or explorer?

2. Since if it was virus, what virus is it? i want to know that. and remove it.

3. Task manager option in Ctrl+Alt+Del is also not there? what to do?

3. Friend laptop is HP dv6502tx, he has some Norton antivirus installed, it is expired. How to know the version of it?

best regards

one of my customer get this problem because of a virus. the computer starts with no desktop. what I did remotely is to open task manager and launch explorer.exe but the virus kill the process after 4-5 seconds. i have uploaded malwarebytes and run a scan. it fixed the issue. I don't if you have the same problem.

If it's a virus, using an offline virus scanning disc is probably in your best interest. Avira makes a good one.

Thanks everyone including the excellant forum, problem solved.

It was cuased by a virus called:

W32.Sality.AE

More info at:

http://www.symantec.com/security_response/...-042106-1847-99

regards