TP-LINK TL-WN881ND Wireless Black Screen at Startup

[GeezerMan]

TP-LINK TL-WN881ND Wireless N300 PCI Express Adapter

I have this wireless card in my PC for over a year. A few days ago I started getting a black screen with movable cursor at the start of Windows 7 Pro.

If I disable the card, windows starts fine. Once inside windows, I can enable the card and it works fine. Tried driver updates on the card and the integrated HD 4600 video.

I then loaded an acronis image of a known good configuration of the OS, and it does the same thing, black screen.

I'm assuming it has to be some sort of hardware fault in the card?

 

[JackMDS]

Make sure that you use pure Driver and not a package that tries to load some OEM cr** at the Startup.

You can check the Startup with cCleaner Tools/Startup..

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Notwithstanding any driver weirdness that Jack mentioned, yeah, you're probably right - bad card.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Do you have any mapped drives from a NAS or router or something? There was a recent Windows update that seems to be causing issues with connectivity.

If you're not getting an IP immediately from your router, then the user shell might be delayed showing up if it's waiting on mapped drives.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Do you have any mapped drives from a NAS or router or something? There was a recent Windows update that seems to be causing issues with connectivity.

If you're not getting an IP immediately from your router, then the user shell might be delayed showing up if it's waiting on mapped drives.

If that were the problem, wouldn't it also exhibit when the wifi card is disabled?

 

[GeezerMan]

thanks for the help. I have no drives attached to this PC other than the internal hard drives. I'm just going to replace the card

 

[PliotronX]

Does it do this if you uninstall through device manager and reboot? It uses an atheros 9000 series, perhaps try drivers from here.

 

[GeezerMan]

I tried drivers, but since I have a known good acronis image of the OS, with my programs installed, that worked fine when I made it, but gives the same black screen when I load it now, it has to be a hardware fault.

 

[GeezerMan]

after further investigation, it appears that Zone Alarm antivirus is causing the problem. On this PC, I had the free version of zone alarm firewall and antivirus. I started with just the firewall, then later added the antivirus. Once the antivirus was added, the problems started.

So, I have removed all of the zone alarm package, and I'm trying another internet security. So far, so good

 

[PliotronX]

Strange! Why would it go FR with the good image? Ah well, glad you got it sorted out!

 

[GeezerMan]

what I thought was a good image was from early December, and I had just installed the ZA antivirus that day. It would run OK at first, then it would start the same black screen upon bootup. That's when I uninstalled the ZA. Been OK for several days now