Desktop does not load - please help

My desktop does not load when starting vista home premium. I get a blank screen with the mouse arrow. Clt-atl-delete brings up task manager. I know at least Explorer.exe is not running...there may be other things that are not running. Any thoughts on how to fix this.

Some background: I had a dual boot set up with Xp installed first, then vista on one hd with two partitions. I used easyBCD as the boot manager. Vista was working well, so I decided to remove xp from the dual boot.

Using easybcd, I removed xp from the boot. Then I made the vista partition active. Using gparted, I formatted the xp partition and then extended the vista partition to the newly unallocated space. Everything worked fine.

I restarted with my vista dvd and used the repair function to restore the vista boot manager. Everything seem to go well and the repair function required a restart. I restarted and got a rundll32 - permission not allowed error I believe (didn't write it down). I restarted again.

Windows stalls at preparing your desktop then loads to a blank screen with a mouse arrow. Tried safe mode with the same results. Cl-alt-delete does bring up the task mananger. I noticed explorer.exe was not running.

I run explorer.exe and it starts up a windows desktop with my user account but in a limited mode. Nothing is available - my doc, pict music etc, all empty folders.

Any thoughts on what is going on or how to fix this?

More info: just noticed my drive is now labeled "D." Should it be labeled "C." Computer Management will not load so I cannot check anything there.

 

Interesting problem.

If it were me, I wouldnt waste my time with it. I would wipe it out and do a complete reformat and reinstall. Of course you may, for whatever reason, not want to proceed with that.

Can you do a system restore in the limited mode account you gain access to? Im putting my money on the fact that you cant, but its worth a shot.

Also, try going to msconfig through your 'run' box and seeing if you may have accidently disabled any vital startup programs. If you dont have access to do either of these things, im not sure how much more help i can be


~Poseign

 

Boot from the Vista DVD and then chose repair computer and then choose the Startup repair, it might take a while, but it would probably fix it.
If that didn't work, try restoring your system to earlier point...