5punk

Hallo!

Turning on my computermachine this morning has taken me to my desktop and a lovely* start up problem. Most of my icons are that generic "We cant find the image for that icon" picture, I get the busy cursor when hovering over the taskbar (rendering it unusable), and there's a mysterious cmd.exe prompt sitting on my desktop that also gets the busy cursor treatment.

I can move my cursor around (obviously) but can't open any files, and Ctrl Alt Del doesn't take me to the options it should. Have tried it in safe mode and everything works swimmingly, no cmd.exe window even. Went in to msconfig and took off a few startup processes and restarted, same problem.

Can't find anything with a quick google search, as "Windows 7 freeze start up cmd prompt" just gives a lot of threads about people using the cmd prompt to solve their Win 7 freezes.

Diagnosis, 5punk?

*Not lovely

Off the top of my head, maybe a problem with the Aero theme? If it's working in safe mode it isn't the OS (which is nice), so it might be a driver or frilly bit.

Oh, possibly. I was running AOE2 yesterday and it had a bit of a mong-up with Aero and wouldn't switch back to it. It's done that before and a restart got it back, but apparently it's having a fir now.

Any ideas how to get it back? Don't think you can install anything so complex as a GPU driver in safe mode?

Hmm, not sure. It'll be somewhere in the display settings I expect (right click on desktop, Personalize). You could at least try setting it to a basic theme and see if it still does it.

Oh, the 'Appearance and Personalization' troubleshooting thing might help (although they usually don't). It just does a check of various things that might cause it to stop working.

Cheers, pants. Couldn't get in to Aero settings/troubleshooting in safe mode so I just uninstalled my drivers. Rebooted as normal and downloaded the latest ones instead. Windows merrily downloaded a bunch of other drivers while I was doing that (thanks, I think?) so I rebooted again and Aero was working. Installed the latest drivers and everything seems to be peachy.

I love 5punk's hardware forum. Best troubleshooting team ever.

Woo!