How to restore blank desktop to normal in Windows XP

Posted by maky • December 11, 2011 • Printer-friendly

ISSUE

When you turn on your computer and when Windows loads up, you don’t see your desktop but only the mouse pointer; and the taskbar also not shown up.

CAUSE

The blank desktop issue is caused normally by corruptions in registry or virus that cause the explorer.exe is not loading.

SOLUTION 1

1. Start your Windows XP to Desktop.

2. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del key to open the Task Manager.

3. Click File menu and click "New Tasks (run...)"

4. Type "CMD" (without quotation marks) in the box and click OK.

5. Type following command into the prompt window:

Reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RpcSs" /v ObjectName /t REG_SZ /d LocalSystem (Press Enter Key)

6. Restart your computer and test the issue again.

SOLUTION 2

Press Ctrl+alt+Del to open task manager and run explorer.exe
Go to Start > Run , type in 'regedit' (without the quotes of course) in the search box .
Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon.
In Winlogon, on the right side, there should be a value called "Shell".
Double click this value. Make sure only "Explorer.exe" is the value of Shell, if anything else is there, simply delete it and leave 'Explorer.exe'. Restart Windows.

SOLUTION 3

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to get windows task manager
From File, new task, typed regedit, click Ok
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\
Delete explorer.exe folder there (you may have an entry in the root of the Image File folder as well. delete them also).
Rebooted and everything was back to normal.