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recently my windows 11 PC has been showing a black screen after i login. i can still use my cursor, and i can use Ctrl Alt Del to open task manager, but it isn’t very useful as it just closes immediately. i have tried many troubleshooting steps, such as starting in safe mode and editing the bios, among others. but, no matter what i try, nothing works.
i have a prebuilt CyberpowerPC C-series gaming PC from 2019, with an AMD ryzen 5 5600 series CPU, a Gigabyte B450M motherboard, and an AMD geforce RX graphics card ( i do not know the exact model number ). I have made no hardware modifications to the PC.
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I have the same issue, but I can use the task manager! I can “run a new task” but I’m lost in that environment… just a black screen and no folders on my desktop or task bar… Microsoft really needs to get these windows 11 updates under control. This is really frustrating.
What’s so weird is I can log out and log in and it looks normal in that circumstance. But then just black screen and mouse… uhhg
start exlorer.exe service didn't work for me. A temporary solution for me was to rollback the last windows update but I resolved the issue with a deactivation of WLAN card.
I have the same problem on several computers (Intel NUC 9, new PC with i9 14th gen, virtual PC in VMWare, in Virtualbox...), all Win11 Pro.
Even on a new PC (about a month old, fresh Windows installation), in this case when I try to login via remote desktop.
Problem is first login attempt.
A bit annoying, but using CTRL+ALT+DEL -> logout -> login again works.
So it seems that there is some "first login after startup" task, that doesn't go well or something not starting in time.
My PC has been black screen and it happened because east access option
How to repair
I had the same problem (black screen forever, with just the cursor, but able to bring up task manager)
As another datapoint, I got around this by using the keyboard to select "always on top" for the task manager. Then, when I got the black screen, and brought up the task manager, it would stay open.
I noticed there were 14 tasks running under "Search" - which seemed weird. I ended that task group from task manager, and Poof, the normal windows desktop came up. Like I said though, this is just one more datapoint, and there's no guarantee this works for anyone else.
The only nonstandard thing about my windows 11 system is that is is a dell 8300 desktop - no TPM and not officially supported by windows 11, and I used a workaround (Rufus) to get windows 11 on it - and so windows update doesn't work (as expected) this is just until I can afford to upgrade HW.
Given that I know I intentionally sacrificed windows update, and it is an unsupported system I assumed the black screen was my own fault, but seeing as how many other people have the issues, maybe it isn't. In any case, the above work around worked for me (ending the big group of search tasks on startup, after making task manager "always on top")
Good luck out there.
(Former Microsoft Employee from the roaring '90s)
