Vista Black Screen w/ Cursor

[goombawaho]

Vista won't boot to desktop. It just stops with a black screen and anice mouse cursor. Tried booting to command prompt and running CHKDSK /F - nothing major found. Ran scan of hard drive as a slave drive and found/cleaned a few bits of malware but Vista still won't boot.

Is there any sure-fire way of curing this? I see a lot of posts on the internet but not many successes other than reloading Vista.

I knew there was a reason I hadn't gone to Vista YET.

 

[goombawaho]

I wouldn't even say "it works", because you still don't know when the problem is going to return. Sorry, but I'm the type of guy that has to have a 100% solution with no doubts as to the root cause. Good enough is NOT good enough for me.

You didn't read my posts:
"Alas - I can't try anything else because I had to use the integrated system recovery function on the laptop's hard drive and get the thing back to the owner."

 

[TheRogueWolf]

I agree with goombawaho, hard-resetting the PC isn't a permanent solution and may actually lead to more problems if it is done repeatedly as the PC isn't going through the correct shutdown procedure.

My machine now appears to be experiencing other problems. A reboot yesterday resulted in an error message advising that Windows was unable to boot and that a System Restore was the only option. After going through that process the initial problem was still there so I've decided to go for a repair-install to see if that fixes the problem. If not, I'll have to do a full reinstall instead. This is not ideal as I would prefer to find out the cause but, as always seems to be the case, I don't have enough time to spare.