windows 11 black screen after login

Hi All,

So I am an IT tech from the UK. I have done many many hours of research into this. Sadly this is a issue that Microsoft need to fix themselves that effects both Windows 10 and Windows 11 from what I have observed. Its been effecting my company for around 3-6 months give or take. I was hoping the update released last night (KB5037853) would fix the issues as it fixes a few Explorer bugs. This effects machines whether on a domain or not, sadly I went down the Group policy rabbit hole for a while... So this happens because the explorer process does not load properly. This causes a plain black screen with just the cursor. If you wait long enough 15-20 mins plus in my experience it does eventually come up with your desktop but does take a while. To speed it up what you can do it press CTRL + ALT + DEL > task manager or CTRL + SHIFT + ESC to open task manager directly. Run New Process and type "explorer" press ok. this normally loads the desktop within a few seconds. Really slow machines may take a bit longer. If its not done in about 30 seconds then this method wont work for you.

During my research I found there was a similar issue a while back due to the app readiness service. see here. Killing the process or disabling the service helped but by my understanding this was patched. May be worth a shot but its not recommended long term.

I have tried all the usual stuff too. Removing any management programs or anti virus on the machine. SFC and chkdsk scans etc. Start up repairs are pointless and wont do anything and AV is also not an issue that i can see.

One thing that might help is removing network / internet access on login (flight mode for example). that seems to make it login properly but that comes with its own issues when on a domain.

Good luck and please let me know if someone finds a solution or Microsoft actually fixes it for once.

Thanks and remember to spread love and kindness even to people that don't deserve it!

Ellie :) <3

Hi, I had same problem today - after logging in to my account (Win 11) the screen was black, only mouse was visible, could not run even Task manager, reboots did not help. Only Ctrl+Alt+Del worked.

I restarted the PC and set *Flight-mode ON* before I logged in and it worked normally again after login. Crazy, only Bitdefender agent and SecurityHealthSystray.exe are allowed on Startup.

Hope this helps

Can confirm this works, do ctrl+alt+del, log out, bottom right turn on flight mode, log back in. This issue happened after I restart my computer cus of some memory leak and pc started updating.

Just had this same issue, black screen with mouse pointer showing, no desktop but ctlr+alt+del works.

I opened task manager and noticed that explorer.exe was taking only 6MB of ram when it usually takes 100+. Restarting it didn't work.

I then ran CMD.exe (click on new process) and it opened just fine. Tried to run SFC /scan now but it wouldn't let me because the user was not an admin.

Opened msedge.exe as a new task to try and find out how I can open a prompt as admin, and it opened just fine.

While I was doing that. The desktop showed up and everything seemed to work.

I was then able to open an admin prompt and run SFC /scan now, which said it found and repaired some corrupted files.

Currently finishing a virus scan and will see if it still works after a reboot, but hopefully this can be of use to others with the same problem.

While on the Black Screen, if you can keep your Task Manager open -> Run a new task: "explorer". That fixed it on my end.

that's about the same for me.
right now (and im meaning in the last 30 mins.) i installed a program called voicemeter. to give myself a digital audio cable, yeah it asked me to restart my computer to make sure everything is running right. after doing that i fall into the same problem.
yeah i have my window's updates turned off now so i can wait till next month for an new update to see if they fixed it then. kinda bothered that i may have to just keep making new restore points (tho i don't really know how. since i don't know where to look.)

tho i don't think voicemeter is the problem here. it can be at the least a suspect.