Help... Black screen with cursor and error message.

I turn on my Alienware M11xr2, looks to load fine, I see the boot up alien head and the windows 7 animation logo. Then screen goes black, I have a cursor I can control and after a couple minutes I get this error message.

Wireless Configuration
"Notification dll has not been registered, program will not work correctly."

When I click ok, the box goes away and the screen stays black and I have an arrow cursor.

What the Hell?

..btw..

I have tried to restart, load in safe mode, disconnect power and reconnect. I ran the system test and it all passed.

 

If you were turning off system processes with either MSconfig or Windows Services then you have turned off a particular one.

You should have the option to "Launch repair" When windows fails and restarts. Do this and use that menu to launch System restore and go back a few days. See if that fixes the problem for you.

 

Windows doesn't give me that option, it never restarts... It just sits on the black screen.

 

Give this a try, the second that the "Loading Windows" Appears, hit the power button on the laptop. Wait a second and hit it again to turn it back on. Don't press anything else till it stops at a screen asking:

"Launch Windows Repair"
"Start Windows Normally"

Click to start a repair. Once it loads it will ask you if you want to use system restore to repair it, click yes and try restoring back a few days. See if that works for you.

 

That worked perfectly, thanks. I am curious though, did I lose anything, drivers, programs or files? Should I worry about it happening again? It looks like all my programs are in tact but there was an Avast shortcut on my desktop that was not there before.

 

All it did was set the laptop back to a point it was a few days ago, with everything in place. Anything you installed or moved around AFTER the date you chose to restore to you will have to reinstall, however if you already had drivers and such set up before the date you chose to go back to then you will still have all of that information installed correctly.

What causes that error is a particular windows process being turned off through MSCONFIG that is required to boot the wireless device and is known to cause hangs if it is turned off. If you did nothing to cause that then I would run a few virus scans as well as do a few runs of Ccleaner (Registry cleaner as well as all around cleaner) To get rid of anything that is conflicting. Outside of that I would not worry about it unless it happens again.

Did you ever install Avast? If so when you went back it might have reconfigured it to put an icon on the desktop, which you can simply remove of course.