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No taskbar, icons, just background (windows NT) **success?!**

S

sputkin

Member
*please see my most current post for update*

Trying to get some clues for an older friend's computer (he is in England, so I unfortunately can't see or touch his computer), here goes:

Problem: He started it one day, went through regular startup procedure, and when it fully booted up all that was there was the wallpaper (the one he's always used), but no taskbar or icons. Evidently mouse cursor moves on screen, but right clicking on desktop, etc, has no effect. He can however Ctr-Alt-Del to bring up taskmanager.

Any suggestion? I know this is a bit sketchy, but don't have much info from him. Could this be something fairly simple? I'm basically shooting in the dark hoping someone's had something similar perhaps.

He has backups of his files, and will reformat if necessary, but is trying to avoid it if there's something simple being overlooked.

Running Windows NT, which I have no experience with, i think v4.0, said it all the updates/patches were up to date.
 
Have him use the Task Manager's "new task" button to start explorer.exe. He has a current antivirus product and firewall protection, hopefully?
 
That sounds like a good thing to try out first, I'll be talking to him in the next day or two and get him to try it. Thanks!
 
Originally posted by: mechBgon
Have him use the Task Manager's "new task" button to start explorer.exe. He has a current antivirus product and firewall protection, hopefully?
Click to expand...


Gave him a call and tried to use this suggestion. Unfortunately, explorer.exe was already running!

The short: Had him look in task manager, (please look below for a list of what was running). Explorer.exe was already running, so I didn't really know what to say. Any more suggestions welcome!! And yes, he has AV (PC-cillin). Forgot to ask about firewall software, but he's just got dialup (is as necessary to have FW with dialup as opposed to broadband?).
Important: If rescuing this install fails, the important thing becomes getting the files safely backed up from his C drive. What are his options for retrieving them (assuming the current state of things)? Hooking up current HD as a slave on another computer is a thought I had, but not sure if he has a friendly enough neighbor for this. Anyone got idea? My limited knowledge has run dry on this problem.




The unnecessarily long (just an, I think, unrelated FYI if interested): One intrigue to add here. I was talking to him while he booted up, and this screen came up: "Disk boot failure: insert system disk and press enter." That had never happened before, but he rebooted and it didn't happen again.

So, on the next good reboot everything went as usual, the login screen comes up, he puts in his user name and password, boots some more, a "found new hardware" window comes up, nothing unusual, then the same old taskbarless, iconless desktop comes up. Here is what was running in his processes (add .exe in your head where appropriate, may be some mispellings):

winlogon, taskmanager, tapiserver, systemidle, spooling, smss, services.exe 3.2MB, rpcss, rasmanx, pstores, pccntupdate, nddeagents, mstask, isass, ncdserve, ikeservice, explorer, esserver, csrss, cgp.

Computer is older than I thought it was, about 8 years. NT v4.0, service pack 6a (either 99 or 00). Has 64MB memory. He's been distantly musing about an upgrade for a while, so I think this will push him over the edge. I think it's been the ol' "it still does what he needs it for so why upgrade" problem.

Oh, and location is southwest England.
 
If he wants to pay postage to/from, he would be welcome to send his hard drive to me, I am in the South East. (Sussex)
 
I'll be talking to him again tomorrow and see if he's game for that if nothing else comes up (I'll PM you). Anyone else have any more ideas, suggestions????
 
He did a restore to a previous "good" state and it didn't seem to help, but don't think he's done an actual repair of nt yet. Another update hopefully tomorrow.
 
Strange success story here! I called him again this morning and was talking with him as it booted up again. He had mentioned that during another restart earlier today the POST gave 5 beeps instead of the usual 1, which was a little different. Anyway, he lets it continue booting up and apart from a couple unusual windows from nt, he's got his entire desktop back, icons, taskbar and all! He doesn't really think he did anything different, but it seems to be working at the moment. At least now he can back up everything (found out he does actually have a cd-rw and a 100Mb zip drive) and then do a clean reformat if the problems continue.

One peculiar thing is that the system clock read Oct 28 at about 8pm (it was Nov 6 at 2:24pm his time). Also, the mouse was very slow, which maybe just meant it's responsiveness settings had to be retweaked. Anyway, slightly odd things that probably mean everything isn't quite right, but still worthy of some sort of happy dance! Thanks to anyone who offered advice, very strange story......
 
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