This morning I got an alert about an automatic update that needed to be installed, and I had to go out anyway, so I shut down the computer. A few hours later, I got back and booted it back up. After an unusually long boot up time, I managed to get to my desktop, only to find that my computer couldn't load any of the desktop icons, and was virtually unresponsive to anything I did. Even ctrl-alt-del didn't do anything. So I manually restarted and tried again. Same thing. Eventually I tried booting into safe mode, which works absolutely fine.
I've tried turning off desktop icons, disabling various unnecessary start-up services/processes, running anti-virus software (which came back negative), and finally uninstalling the Windows updates that seemingly caused this. None of it has had any effect. The only updates left from that set of updates are miscellaneous Microsoft Office patches that I can't uninstall in safe mode.
I've spent a couple hours searching online for someone else with a similar problem, and I only found one forum post about a problem like this. That person, however, solved it by uninstalling MSE, which isn't (and has never been, to my knowledge) installed on this computer.
This is a 64x computer, if that helps any. A million thanks to anyone who can figure out how to fix this.
I've tried turning off desktop icons, disabling various unnecessary start-up services/processes, running anti-virus software (which came back negative), and finally uninstalling the Windows updates that seemingly caused this. None of it has had any effect. The only updates left from that set of updates are miscellaneous Microsoft Office patches that I can't uninstall in safe mode.
I've spent a couple hours searching online for someone else with a similar problem, and I only found one forum post about a problem like this. That person, however, solved it by uninstalling MSE, which isn't (and has never been, to my knowledge) installed on this computer.
This is a 64x computer, if that helps any. A million thanks to anyone who can figure out how to fix this.