User profile and desktop unclickable and unviewable from windows explorer

Posted by Abel on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Abel
Published on 2010-03-16T20:50:17Z Indexed on 2010/03/16 20:51 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 511

Filed under:

windows-vista

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windows-vista-sp2

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desktop

Situation: Windows Vista, latest updates. After restarting to complete an installation, I find myself looking at a totally black windows desktop without any icons. The start menu and taskbar, including quickstart icons, appears. Some, but not all task bar tray icons appear. The systems seems stable.

When I open Windows Explorer and click "desktop" in the folder treeview, the cursor immediately jumps back to the previously selected item. No error. Same when clicking on my user's profile or my documents. When I try "save as" in, say, Notepad, nothing happens, the dialog box (which defaults to "my documents") doesn't even show. Again, no error.

Nothing serious afaict in the event log. Typing something Start > Search shows "Search failed to initialize".

Anybody ever encountered such abomination?

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