Windows 10: Black screen with cursor after login, explorer.exe not running

I've read a hundred threads on this and tried everything, no success so far. Here's the situation:

• On boot, login screen appears, I enter password, Windows begins to boot, then black screen with cursor.
• Ctrl-Alt-Delete does bring up Task Manager, and from there I can launch a bunch of stuff ... was even able to start Firefox from command line, download Autoruns, etc.
• Explorer.exe is not running in Task Manager. If I "manually" run it, it does appear in running programs list, but desktop remains black.
• Win-P arrow arrow etc doesn't do anything for me.
• SFC says that everything is fine.
• In Device Manger, I've tried updating display driver, as well as changing to the MS generic display driver. No joy, and anyways the display driver seems fine since I'm able to manually launch stuff from Task Manager.
• In Device Manager, "View/Show Hidden Devices" brings up second Display adapter. If I delete this, it comes back on reboot.
• System Restore has one restore point, but when I select it, Windows says that it doesn't actually exist.
• This is a laptop with no external devices attached to it. Intel 945GM chipset. There are no video options in the bios.
• Windows 10 Professional 1511. This problem occurred after I upgraded to Creators 1703, had problems that I couldn't resolve, and asked Windows to roll back to previous version (1511).

Thanks for any help!

:)

 

Black screen with cursor

When I switch on my sony vaio the login page for windows opens fine but after logging in the screen goes black with just a cursor. I can open up task manager and running 'explorer.exe' makes the screen appear back as normal but doing this everytime I switch
on my laptop is a pain.

I have tried to use the computer in safe mode as well but I have the same black screen and cursor issue.

This problem seems to have started following a windows creator update.

Any help would be really useful.

 

Computer does not work after Windows 10 update

it seems the application explorer.exe is not working properly. I tried launching explorer.exe using Task Manager with administrative privileges. I did get back the desktop screen and all the other icons along with the Task bar, but after a moment they
all go back to being a black screen and a cursor. It keeps happening over and over again everytime I tried to run explorer.exe, Please help me fix this problem.

 

Well, I would just go ahead and either do a clean install or at LEAST a repair install. Sounds to me like something went south during the roll back.

Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade - Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials

Clean Install Windows 10 - Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials

 

*Sad
Okay, repair install doesn't sound too disruptive ... the link says that the ISO must be the same or newer build. I've got a 1511 Threshold 2 ISO (10586.164), but my laptop build number has incremented a bit beyond that (10586.twohundredsomething) due to patches from Windows Update. Should the ISO work anyways for repair install? Versions newer than 1511 don't work on this laptop.

 

I've had that happen a couple of times now. I upgraded a couple of PC's from Pro to Enterprise by mounting the Enterprise ISO and running setup.exe. On the first boot to desktop screen is blank and start menu doesn't work. About the only thing that does work is ctrl alt del. After a reboot or two everything worked for me though. I posting this from one of the affected PC's.

 

Alrighty, repair installation worked, and all my settings, documents, and apps are still there, so phew. Apparently it's not necessary for the full build number of the ISO to match the installed version, only that the integer portion match.

 

Glad you got it sorted. *Thumbs