No Desktop Icons or taskbar at startup/Blank screen with cursor

Hi everyone,

I just wasted my Sunday afternoon trying to figure this one out and thought I'd spare anybody the waste of time.

Since installing the Windows 7 RC, I had sporadically had trouble with my desktop icons and taskbar not appearing when I started up. I went on a wild goose chase changing user accounts and found that when you change your settings to having multiple user accounts (one of which you have to log into at startup) the problem manifested itself as a blank screen with a lonely mouse pointer that was useless.

The answer was to start up in "Safe Mode" and then take a look at my monitor setup (I got there via "Adjust Screen Resolution"). I found that the monitor was set up for 2 monitors instead of just one. I set it to just the one monitor and I've never had the problem again.

Took me the best part of 4 hours to figure that out, and I only figured it out by accident when I hit the "Switch monitor" button on my monitor accidently when I was trying to hit the power button.

Hope this is useful to someone.

Dennis

LOL, thanks DennisD

Hey folks, ran into the same problem as Dennis and others. Tried checking monitors under screen resolution as Dennis had suggested, however only one monitor was listed under Number of monitors on my machine:

"Hi everyone,

I just wasted my Sunday afternoon trying to figure this one out and thought I'd spare anybody the waste of time.

Since installing the Windows 7 RC, I had sporadically had trouble with my desktop icons and taskbar not appearing when I started up. I went on a wild goose chase changing user accounts and found that when you change your settings to having multiple user accounts (one of which you have to log into at startup) the problem manifested itself as a blank screen with a lonely mouse pointer that was useless.

The answer was to start up in "Safe Mode" and then take a look at my monitor setup (I got there via "Adjust Screen Resolution"). I found that the monitor was set up for 2 monitors instead of just one. I set it to just the one monitor and I've never had the problem again.

Took me the best part of 4 hours to figure that out, and I only figured it out by accident when I hit the "Switch monitor" button on my monitor accidently when I was trying to hit the power button.

Hope this is useful to someone.

Dennis"

Having that solution not work, I thought trying the other DVI output on the back of my GEFORCE NVIDIA card might work.
And it did! Screen went right to the Desktop View, so give that a try if you have Dual DVI outputs on the back of your NVIDIA-based card.

Mark West

Dennis, A little late, but I finally found your posting. Same problem same solution.
Multiple displays. Thanks