Kathryn Bassett
kathryn at bassett.net
Mon Aug 22 20:45:50 CDT 2005
Win2000pro sp4 Boot up, and instead of showing desktop with icons etc, it's showing nothing but blue (not blue screen of death, but the blue that is normally background). No start button, no nothing. The only thing I can bring up is control-alt-delete. I do see the graphics that say Windows is booting, etc; it's just that the desktop is non-existant. The Windows button doesn't bring up the start menu either. I finally got into Safe Mode, but the same problem is there. I get a black screen with Safe Mode in all four corners, but no icons, so Start, nothing. I am able to boot into Safe Mode with Command prompt and pretty conversant with dos commands, but I don't know what to check. Everything was working last night at shut down. He (my husband) had only been on long enough to grab his email, and do some eBay surfing. We have all the usual safeguards, McAfee, ZA, IHateSpam, and other stuff. He *does* occasionally visit x rated sites, but since we'd been gone on a trip, he didn't do any of that last night. I just asked and he said it's probably been at least a month since he went on any of the x rated sites. Because of problems in the past (mostly toolbars from those sites), I've gotten him pretty paranoid about doing things that would cause a problem, and it's been almost a year since there has been a problem, so he's learned. And he only gets a few emails from trusted people, with nothing unusual about them. So, I don't see how a virus or anything else could have done anything. The only exception being something that was timed to go off today (know of any?) So, what next to solve this problem? Would any of these help me (keeping in mind I can only get safe mode dos answers): Enable boot logger, enable vga mode, debugging mode? If so, which should I choose, then how do I check the result? -- Kathryn Rhinehart Bassett (Pasadena CA) "Genealogy is my bag" "GH is my soap" kathryn at bassett.net http://bassett.net