Windows Vista Save Desktop Layout In Windows' title='Windows Vista Save Desktop Layout In Windows' />This isnt an authoritative answer Ive just had this problem, sifted through the initial bogus media coverage, found a solution, and started speculating on the real cause. Heres a workaround for the problem, though this company mis diagnosed the problem it wasnt an ACL problem. This fix is opaque and comes from a third party, but it fixed the problem for me http www. Updated to include Windows 7 solution Weve all been there. Your Desktop icons have been lovingly and painstakingly placed into specific locations work. Development of Windows Vista occurred over the span of five and a half years, starting in earnest in May 2001, prior to the release of Microsofts Windows XP. Save and restore the positions of the Windows Desktop Icons. Fix Desktop Icons Position and Folder View Settings Problem in Windows 10 I have received many emails and comments from various AskVG readers about this annoying. Black Screen woes could affect millions on Windows Vista and XP. Note their fix is an exe and they dont tell you what it does. I appreciate that they are helping, but they should fully disclose their fix so at least advanced users can have confidence in their good intentions. Heres a better possible reason for why the problem occurred a registry key telling Windows which shell to run on login was corrupted a REGSZ key was missing a 0. Sounds somewhat plausible, but the fishy part is what caused that http www. Windows Black Screen Root Cause. My symptoms observations I ran into this problem on a Win. Windows Vista Ultimate. I log in, get a black screen, and Windows never proceeds to setting up my desktop, etc ie, Windows never launches explorer. Running the fixing tool from Prevx did solve the problem, however their diagnosis for the cause of the problem was wrong their initial hypothesis was the ACLs were incorrect and implied Windows Update patches broke it, but that was wrong. They followed up with the non null terminated string hypothesis. Before running Prevxs tool, the registry key existed, Reg. Edit visually displayed the expected value explorer. ACLs were fine.   Yet, of course, I couldnt successfully log in. My pure speculation about the cause So if the missing 0 hypothesis is correct, and if the Prevx tool deletes recreates the value in the registry key, obviously that should fix the problem. FYI look at the MSDN docs for Reg. Set. Value. Ex for a note about the lp. Data parameter needing a 0. But that doesnt explain how the value got messed up in the first place  I dont go around removing terminating zeros from REGSZ values for fun nor profit. Sounds like either random corruption, or more likely, something wanted to run something when Windows boots then incorrectly undid their change to the registry. I saw that some MS security folks suggested this could be caused by malware http blogs. Operating under that hypothesis, I ran Forefront on Wednesday using the current signatures, but it didnt report anything. That may not spot a novel virus or rootkit, of course. Another wild guess perhaps the act of installing certain classes of patches could cause the problem, due to a hypothetical bug in Windows Update. How To Install Ssh Iphone 3G. Windows Update does something on boot up to configure patches, and it looks like this happens after login but before Explorer is running. Perhaps Windows Update itself could be editing this registry key to replace the shell with another program that configures patches or options to explorer. If thats how it works which is a big guess, then maybe when WU restores the registry key value to explorer. Win. 7.   Of course, I would have expect to see a bad value for this reg key in Reg. Edit if this were the case. I didnt perhaps there were some unprintable characters in the string, or Ive empirically shot down my own wild guess. Note my problem occurred on a Windows 7 Ultimate machine that was upgraded from Vista Ultimate. Perhaps something during upgrade may have introduced some registry corruption that didnt show up until another value in the registry was changed later  BTW, to confirm the fix narrow down this fix, perhaps someone w a broken machine can reboot into Safe Mode, run Reg. Edit, delete HKEYLOCALMACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrent. Windows Vista Save Desktop Layout In Windows' title='Windows Vista Save Desktop Layout In Windows' />Desktop Restore. One of my favorite programs to use for restoring a desktop full of icons is Desktop Restore by Jamie OConnell. It works with Windows 98, ME, XP, NT. Windows 7 has a default picture viewer called Windows Photo Viewer which is similar the one in Windows Vista. Even though Microsoft have changed the look a. Hi everybody, Im having trouble with my windows 7 right now, its an ultimate version, I just shut it off last night and opened it up this morning. Our free online Windows Vista tutorial is presented in a questionandanswer format. It is a comprehensive guide to using Windows Vista. If you have Windows Vista. VersionWinlogonShell then recreate the Shell key as a REGSZ key, with the value explorer. If that works, that could help confirm the cause and allow us to give standalone instructions for a fix that we can have more confidence in as opposed to telling people to run an exe from a third party. Please enable cookies and refresh the page.