Win 7 won't boot to desktop

Darkroom

Suspended / Banned
Messages
244
Edit My Images
No
Hi guys

I'm a bit stuck with my laptop not booting fully. It was working fine until I did a shutdown, rebooted straight away and ran into this problem. I can log in but then I just get a blank grey desktop (my usual colour). The only thing I can get running is task manager using Ctrl-Alt-Del and I get the same result trying safe mode.

The laptop is a HP 8760w running Windows 7 Pro SP1.

Any ideas how to fix it without reinstalling everything?
 
Last edited:
The first thing I can think of us reboot and leave it see if it comes up it may take some time updates recovery
 
In task manager select New Task
Type explorer in the box

This should get you back to your normal desktop
 
The first thing I can think of us reboot and leave it see if it comes up it may take some time updates recovery

Thanks, I've already rebooted multiple times and had it on all night but no change. In any case I've had always update checking turned off so no update has been applied for a few months now.
 
In task manager select New Task
Type explorer in the box

This should get you back to your normal desktop

Cheers. I wish it was that simple - that was the first thing I tried. There is an explorer process but killing it and running another Explorer process doesn't get anything going :(

There's only 7 processes running: crss.exe, winlogon, nvxdsync, nwsvr, nvwmi64, dwm and explorer.
 
run the repair disk and revert to earlier restore point.
 
Have a read of this, it may help.
 
Have a read of this, it may help.

Thanks for that link Steve, very useful.

Finally got it sorted. Discovered that plain Safe Mode without networking or command booted up. Out of habit I was just trying safe mode with networking. Next boot it offered the more advanced boot options and was finally able to restore to the last known good configuration.

Thanks for all the help guys
 
Last edited:
For future reference, this type of problem (where you can log-in but you get a blank desktop) is usually a corruption of the user profile.
It's useful to have more than one log-in on your machine in order to resolve this type of issue - backup the corrupt user profile in order to recover any documents you may need, delete the user profile and then re-create the user from scratch.

(Get-WmiObject -Class win32_userprofile | where-object { $_.localpath -like "*myuser*" } ).delete()

Where "myuser" is the name of the profile you are trying to erase.
 
For future reference, this type of problem (where you can log-in but you get a blank desktop) is usually a corruption of the user profile.
It's useful to have more than one log-in on your machine in order to resolve this type of issue - backup the corrupt user profile in order to recover any documents you may need, delete the user profile and then re-create the user from scratch.

(Get-WmiObject -Class win32_userprofile | where-object { $_.localpath -like "*myuser*" } ).delete()

Where "myuser" is the name of the profile you are trying to erase.


Thanks Afasoas, that's very useful to know. I'll setup another login just incase this happens again.
 
Back
Top