Black screen, ABP not working after 6/22 cumulative updates

My laptop updated 6/14 as I finished my workday:


This morning when I opened the laptop, the normal login screen was displayed, but when I logged in, all I had was a black screen, with the mouse pointer visible.

After waiting five minutes and nothing happening, I force-restarted, and same thing.

I could ctrl-alt-d into the task manager (pressing the Windows key did nothing), so opted to switch users. Logged into an extra account I have on the computer if a repair place needs access, and that came up fine. Switched users to my real account and same thing - visible login screen, go to black upon login. Switched users to the extra account it was fine. Switched users to real account, and this time everything came up fine.

I definitely waited through the completion of the update process yesterday, ending with the normal login screen being presented.

Any idea what happened?

And on a different note, on the morning of 6/14, my Firefox browser updated to version 114.0.1 and Adblock Plus stopped working. Pages that I visit all the time with the ads blocked, were showing ads. On my home computer - Windows 10 and also updated to 114.0.1 - this wasn't happening; ads were blocked on the same sites.

This morning, once I had my display working in my regular account, Firefox 114.0.1 was again blocking ads as it should have.

What might have happened there?

Hi,
What else do you have going at start-up?
Any third-party executable like Explorer Patcher or anything else.
If you press ctrl+alt+del after you have logged in, (at the black screen)
and choose task manager, is Explorer in the list of running items?

OAT said:

Hi,
What else do you have going at start-up?
Any third-party executable like Explorer Patcher or anything else.
If you press ctrl+alt+del after you have logged in, (at the black screen)
and choose task manager, is Explorer in the list of running items?

Click to expand...

Here are my enabled startup apps:


I've never had this issue before. After making the post, I restarted my computer to see what would happen, and my login to my normal account went fine.

Looking at my event viewer I see nothing unusual either. Lots of application errors with SmartAudio3 (despite my computer audio seemingly working fine), and those errors appear every day in the event viewer.

I'm not "too too" worried about this, since it's now working fine including working fine after a test restart. But I'm curious what might have happened, and if others experienced this same problem.

@112022



You might want to consider, trimming those startup items to only what you really need running at startup.
Many Services are already set to Manual. When set to Manual, they are off until needed, then they automatically... turn on.


Here are my Startups...






And all the "disabled" items work just fine when I click on them, inside Windows.
Just tested... it took a whole second to open Terminal.
Macrium Reflect... 1/2 second to splash screen, and 1.5 seconds to program window.



The old mechanics saying is just as true in Windows...
"The fewer the moving parts, the fewer the problems".

In this guide, i will help you troubleshoot black screen problem in Windows 10 and Windows 11.