Desktop Won't Load

[joe43wv]

A buddy of mine brought me his laptop yesterday stating his screen wouldn't show anything. After looking at it here's what I found.

1. Screen does work, issue resides in Vista.

2. When running in Normal bootup the system loads up to the Welcome screen then after that the desktop won't load, just black screen and no icons or taskbar.

I tried loading up in Safe Mode and same result but a spyware app would ran. i cleaned it all up but am still having the same issue of the black screen in both normal and safe mode. Any thoughts on what is wrong and ways to fix it?

[Tripredacus]

Do you at least get a mouse cursor? If you do, you can get access to the system again by pressing WindowsKey+U to bring up the Accessibility panel. With those limited options, you should be able to find a browse button which should allow you to open notepad, if not explorer.

[cluberti]

You could also use CTRL+ALT+DEL to open taskmanager to see if explorer.exe is running - if not, the default shell in the registry probably was damaged by the malware and no longer points to the correct binaries. I believe it's HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell, and Shell should be explorer.exe, and Userinit should be userinit.exe.

[joe43wv]

I am able to open up task manager, and the first thing I tried was run explorer.exe. When I run that it opens up My Computer. I'll check the registry and see what I can find there. I'll update when I have more info.

[joe43wv]

That worked great, thanks cluberti, only one other problem. When I checked the registry the Shell was corrupted. I changed it to explorer.exe then ran the task again and the desktop showed up with no problems. After I rebooted I got the black screen again but this time when I run explorer in teh run bar the desktop shows up. What do I need to do to reenable to to run at statup like it should?