Vista - Desktop missing/windows explorer problems

I’ve had this problem for about a week now. I was happily computing on my
new (one month old) HP dv6000t when I decided it was time for me to go to
bed. Usually I either just close the lid to my laptop, or leave the lid up
and just hit “shutdown�. This night I hit shutdown and then as it was
shutting down I closed the lid.

The next morning when I woke up, I opened the lid to my laptop and saw that
my pointer was there and responding to the mouse, but the desktop was just a
blank screen. Nothing worked, no right click/left click, nothing happened
when I hit the “windows� button (on the keyboard). I was able to bring up
the task manager by hitting cntrl-alt-del, and after a lot of internet
searches on my spare computer, found out that I could kill the explorer
process and then launch it again to get my desktop back.

Although my desktop is now back, I have to do this every time I shutdown the
laptop. As soon as it comes back up I get the login screen, I login, and
then it puts me out on a blank screen with the mouse pointer. I can
kill/restart explorer, but that doesn’t bring back everything I need. The
Device Manager, Network and other systems in the Control Panel will just hang
if I try to launch them. This makes it impossible to run many of the
diagnostics I would normally run in this situation.

Now, I know that this problem is fairly prevalent because I was able to find
quite a few internet posts from people in the same predicament.
Unfortunately, all of them offer little to no help, with the most common
response being “reinstall Vista�. I don’t have a good point-in-time backup
to load; Vista apparently never took the snapshot. I would have tried to
figure out how to take one manually if I thought that I would need to be
doing a system restore this early on.

The other piece of advice I see quite a bit is “return it to the
manufacturer�. I am reluctant to do since this seems to be a software issue,
not a hardware one.

So far I have rolled back my video drivers and reset everything I could to
the factory defaults, but this issue persists. Is this problem as
wide-spread as it seems to me, and is there a known solution to this? Any
help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Sounds like your returning from sleep/hibernate mode, rather than a real
shutdown/startup. I'd suggest you avoid these modes for now as they don't
work well on older hardware that has been upgraded to Vista or with a some
current drivers that aren't really Vista-certified. Things should improve
when SP1 and newer drivers are released.

Stuart.

"Peter" wrote:

> I’ve had this problem for about a week now. I was happily computing on my
> new (one month old) HP dv6000t when I decided it was time for me to go to
> bed. Usually I either just close the lid to my laptop, or leave the lid up
> and just hit “shutdown�. This night I hit shutdown and then as it was
> shutting down I closed the lid.
>
> The next morning when I woke up, I opened the lid to my laptop and saw that
> my pointer was there and responding to the mouse, but the desktop was just a
> blank screen. Nothing worked, no right click/left click, nothing happened
> when I hit the “windows� button (on the keyboard). I was able to bring up
> the task manager by hitting cntrl-alt-del, and after a lot of internet
> searches on my spare computer, found out that I could kill the explorer
> process and then launch it again to get my desktop back.
>
> Although my desktop is now back, I have to do this every time I shutdown the
> laptop. As soon as it comes back up I get the login screen, I login, and
> then it puts me out on a blank screen with the mouse pointer. I can
> kill/restart explorer, but that doesn’t bring back everything I need. The
> Device Manager, Network and other systems in the Control Panel will just hang
> if I try to launch them. This makes it impossible to run many of the
> diagnostics I would normally run in this situation.
>
> Now, I know that this problem is fairly prevalent because I was able to find
> quite a few internet posts from people in the same predicament.
> Unfortunately, all of them offer little to no help, with the most common
> response being “reinstall Vista�. I don’t have a good point-in-time backup
> to load; Vista apparently never took the snapshot. I would have tried to
> figure out how to take one manually if I thought that I would need to be
> doing a system restore this early on.
>
> The other piece of advice I see quite a bit is “return it to the
> manufacturer�. I am reluctant to do since this seems to be a software issue,
> not a hardware one.
>
> So far I have rolled back my video drivers and reset everything I could to
> the factory defaults, but this issue persists. Is this problem as
> wide-spread as it seems to me, and is there a known solution to this? Any
> help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks!
>