Explorer.exe does not work on startup

[Mennoh160]

Hello everyone,
I bought a new win 8.1 laptop a few days ago (asus n551jk cn157h), but I have a little problem that I cannot solve. Whenever i start up the laptop (from being completely off) and log in, explorer.exe doesn't work properly and all I see is a black screen and a cursor. I open up task manager, and in the list of processes it says explorer.exe is running. When I select it and choose 'restart' it just removes it from the list and that's it. If I then go to new task and start explorer.exe manually, it does work. Also, if I don't 'restart' it first, the list will show 2 explorer.exes running and still nothing will happen.
Also when I booted the laptop the very first time, I waited about 5 min for the explorer to start, then I pressed some buttons, and after pressing the windows button explorer finally started.
I have searched the internet for solutions, but the ones I tried haven't worked (checked regedit values, ran sfc /scannow, scanned for viruses). I have not yet tried to reinstall windows, because I do not have it on a cd, and I also do not have a backup of my hdd.

Does anyone know a possible solution? I only have win 8.1 on the hdd in my laptop, so wiping the hdd and reinstalling windows isn't really an option, but losing all my personal files isn't a problem as they only consist of downloaded stuff I can get back easily.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Wepynx]

Hello. Have you tried booting into safe mode to see if anything is present on the screen ?

 

[PliotronX]

If it's anything like a machine I worked on last week, safe mode will not work either and plus Windows 8 removes the ability to F8 into safe mode so you have to get into advanced startup by hard powering off the system in the middle of bootup and then powering up Windows 8 will "notice" the system didn't start up correctly which can be tricky with a SSD. Then I would try either a full system reset or to keep any documents, a refresh should do the trick.

 

[Ketchup]

Can you tell us what you have installed on the laptop thus far? Did you have anything plugged into it? Sounds like something could be wrong with it from the factory.

The first boot does take a while. Was there anything on the screen during the 5 minutes?

Once you finally get it going, how does it run?

As PliotronX, a factory reset may be a good option here.

 

[Mennoh160]

I just now booted into safe mode, and it worked fine. Then I searched for a bit for programs that might cause explorer.exe to fail, and apparently wse_vosteran was installed on my system. It didn't seem like a windows program so I googled it and it turns out to be hard-to-remove malware so I am now restoring windows, wich will remove all downloaded programs including wse_vosteran. I should be fine after this (at least I hope/think so...), all I'll need to do is reinstall drivers etc.
Thanks for your help!