Vista start-up issues....

Vista Home Premium 32bit.

When booting in normal mode, it gets only so far and stops with just the pointer on a black screen. If I open the Task Manager, and kill the explorer.exe process (which is only using 928k; seems a bit light), then click File > New Task and run explorer.exe, the desktop comes right up (and now explorer.exe is using 10000+ k). Booting in Safe Mode works fine. I've tried a System Restore to 5 days ago and it did nothing. I've tried the Vista Start-up Repair option from the install disc and that didn't work. Since you can't really perform safe repair re-installs like you could with WinXP, I'm kind of stuck.... any thoughts or ideas??? Suggestions???

Thanks!

[dlb]

 

UPDATE- no programs will install in normal mode; I can browse the hard drive and CD drive, but any time I try to install anything, I get the Vista 'hourglass' (the little blue spinning circle thingy) and that's it. I then have to go to Task Mgr and end Explorer, then re-start Explorer. I ran a virus scan using the Dr.Web Live CD (more info here ) and it came up clean. I've looked through the registry and start up keys and menus and haven't noticed any obvious malware..... so.... I guess I'm still stuck....
:banghead :cry :boxing :mad :tas

 

UPDATE 2- in safe mode, I can install MalwareBytes and I'm running a scan now. I guess we'll see.... I don't think it's a malware problem, but I could be wrong...

 

Nope... it's not malware. I guess I'll have to install a clean Vista.... you know what? It seems that I answer my own posts a lot these days LOL

 

I went to the login key in the registry just to be sure the shell entry pointed to Explorer.exe like it should.... and it was fine...
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\winlogon\ . . . . Shell = C:\windows\explorer.exe

Anyone? Anything?

 

From what you have said [and perhaps stating the obvious], it would appear that possibly a hw driver is not loading correctly [since it appears to boot correctly in safe mode].

I presume that you have looked in Device Manager and that all looks fine.

With this type of problem, I sometimes do the following [never tried this in Vista], go into the Device Manager and one at a time disable sound card, network card, etc and reboot after each successive item is disabled.

Good Luck

 

Thanks, but I ended up formatting and reloading Windows. All was well in the Device Manager, and Vista is too eager to reinstall drivers. It's difficult to uninstall a device and reboot before Vista tries to reinstall it. I chalked the problem up to a user profile or login issue; when Vista started loading it would eventually stop at a black screen with a pointer, shortly after displaying the Welcome screen (no user showing). If I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and then clicked "Log Off", it would go to the user list; I could click the user and the desktop would load as usual, but even then, no software would run correctly. You could navigate and browse folders and hard drives, but could not install, or uninstall anything, or surf the web, browse CDs, etc... . I tried everything I could think of and couldn't get it to work right, so I formatted.