HP black screen problem

[kerouac9]

HP customer support wanted $50 to talk to them. I hope someone here can help.

My HP notebook PC is booting fine, but when it should go to the desktop, the screen is black except for the mouse cursor. I can open up the task manager with ctrl-alt-del and the normal login screen comes on, but when I run the task manager, the screen goes back to black.

Any ideas? The damned thing is 88 days out of warranty. I'm running Windows Vista is that information is in any way helpful. Is there something I can run to get my desktop up?

 

[Chaz]

Sounds like a corrupted registry. Have you tried system restore?
Try F8 for advanced Windows startup.
It also may be in the HP recovery options when you boot. F2 or F10 on HP I think.

Make sure to do a disk check as well.

 

[kerouac9]

I asked google, and apparently the problem is bad logs? I tried clearing that folder from the command prompt as "computer", and I was told access to c:/windows/system32/winevt was denied. That's weird, because we don't have a separate admin user. I'm trying it in safe mode. We REALLY don't want to do another system restore...