Windows 10 no desktop after login

When you say "safeboot has no effect", do you mean that going into safe mode does the same thing? Have you tried going into the Windows troubleshooting menu and trying the options there? (Hold Shift and click restart, when it reboots, it give the options to Continue, Use a Device, or Troubleshoot. You might start with "Uninstall Updates" or "Startup Repair". But the last Hail Mary would me to "Reset this PC" and you can do that with choosing to save files. It will reinstall Windows but you won't loose any files, you will have to reinstall all your programs, but it does work.

I have seen that issue..... I only wait until the process end and the explorer stats normally

Some clients call me for that issue.... after rebooting and awaiting the process all works as stated.... may be is a microsoft error that does not show the Applying custom settings message anfter logon.....

Spending all that time doing all you did why not just wipe it an format drive and reload fresh OS

Probably be less time consuming

Gorfmaster1 wrote:

When you say "safeboot has no effect", do you mean that going into safe mode does the same thing? {snip}You might start with "Uninstall Updates"

Safeboot: correct. black screen with arrow and that's it. I hadn't thought about trying to remove the update that way, not done it before. Will give that a shot.

mauricioandresbustamantevivero wrote:

I have seen that issue..... I only wait until the process end and the explorer stats normally

Some clients call me for that issue.... after rebooting and awaiting the process all works as stated.... may be is a microsoft error that does not show the Applying custom settings message anfter logon.....

WarKraft wrote:

Spending all that time doing all you did why not just wipe it an format drive and reload fresh OS

Probably be less time consuming

The OS part is pretty simple, yes... but given these are "more than office" machines with a lot of extra software, hardware settings, specialized hardware, etc. doing a full reinstall is a last resort because of the time involved. They haven't had the desire to do any image-based backups of all machines prior due to cost, but this may push them in that direction.

Luckily, the ability to open their main program from the task manager has allowed them to get the most important work done during the day, so I can try and fix later.

I've seen this multiple times, I'm thinking it's a display driver issue, but in all honesty, the only 'fix' I've come up with, is to re-image it.

dang42 wrote:

I've seen this multiple times, I'm thinking it's a display driver issue, but in all honesty, the only 'fix' I've come up with, is to re-image it.

I've seen a lot of posts talking about that, but I would think that if it were directly a driver issue, totally removing the display adapter AND deleting the associated driver files would, at least temporarily, fix the issue... in that with no drivers, and the 'default/basic' vga driver, that should allow the desktop to appear, at which point the drivers could be reinstalled.

Everything looks normal... when you can open it... it's just the desktop itself that fails. And why 'explorer.exe /f' opens the file explorer, with everything including mapped drives, works just as it should, but the 'desktop' explorer.exe does nothing.

Event viewer shows nothing of consequence, even when I stop and restart explorer processes. Are there other tools to consider looking at?

I know this is going to sound really dumb, but remove it from the domain. I didn't see that this had been done, but this same exact thing happened to a computer at a client of mine. We removed it from the domain, restart it, loaded it up and the monitors worked. We restarted it a few times, it continued to work, and then we added it back to the domain.

Like I said, I understand it sounds stupid, and we never found the root of the issue, but it worked.

Can you Ctrl+Shift+Esc and manually start Explorer from Task Manager?

rthonpm wrote:

Can you Ctrl+Shift+Esc and manually start Explorer from Task Manager?

as mentioned, killing and restarting explorer process has no effect. explorer.exe /f does bring up the file explorer. :-(

Anonimoose wrote:

I know this is going to sound really dumb, but remove it from the domain. I didn't see that this had been done, but this same exact thing happened to a computer at a client of mine. We removed it from the domain, restart it, loaded it up and the monitors worked. We restarted it a few times, it continued to work, and then we added it back to the domain.

It wouldn't be the first time something 'dumb' worked... I'll give that a shot when a machine is available and see what happens. And it's only dumb if it breaks something more, lol.

Well, that didn't do anything :-/

Made sure a local admin account existed... removed from the domain, rebooted, logged on as local user: same black screen. Rejoined the domain, still have a black screen with arrow.

One thing I noticed this time: upon login, the initial 'preparing...' screen hangs until I press CAD, then it's gone. No idea if that means anything or not.

Had a similar issue what we found was that Windows 10 (2004 version an up) was having issues with login scripts, specifically drive mapping in the login scripts. We removed the login scripts and used the GPO drive mapping instead (user config\preferences\windows settings\drive maps) no more black screen

Be sure not to use "replace" unless you need to when mapping that way, as it will disconnect and reconnect the users when group policy refreshes

SOLVED!

The workstations had 'openshell' installed. Why this didn't jump at me before (insert forehead slap here). After one 'in-place' reinstall of Windows, I noticed that the default Win10 start screen with apps came up, and that's when I realized openshell might be the glitch.

Ran a repair of openshell, and the desktop is back! So far of 4 machines, this has been the fix.

Lyttek wrote:

SOLVED!

The workstations had 'openshell' installed. Why this didn't jump at me before (insert forehead slap here). After one 'in-place' reinstall of Windows, I noticed that the default Win10 start screen with apps came up, and that's when I realized openshell might be the glitch.

Ran a repair of openshell, and the desktop is back! So far of 4 machines, this has been the fix.

What version of OpenShell was it? The current version as of April 7th, 2021, is4.4.160.

Gregg

4.4.142 I think...