Windows Boots to Black screen, NO Desktop, taskbar, start ,menu
Starting yesterday after a cumulative update installed in windows update, I started having an issue where I couldn't access zip files because the instant I would click or right click on one it would crash explorer and cause it to restart. I could open them by starting 7zip or winrar manually but oddly enough if I tried opening them as admin to extract to a protected directory it would again crash explorer and cause it to restart Yesterday I attempted fixing it with sfc /scannow which did find and fix some errors but did nothing to fix the problem I was chasing, so I gave up and put it off to the next day. The update is the only notable change I could think of to attribute the problem to so today I tried to use system restore to roll back the changes and that failed, twice, and on the second time when windows rebooted, it went to a black screen, with the dialog box open saying that the restore had failed, but nothing else ever started. Thinking it had perhaps started in safe mode, I used ctrl/alt/delete to log out and restarted from there, only to return to the same black screen. So now using ctrl/alt/delete to gain access to the taskmanager is the only way I'm able to get an instance of explorer to open so I can open a browser etc. and is the only way I'm able to use the computer at all now. I tried once more to run the sfc /scannow command but it found nothing. I don't know how to start the settings app manually, if it's even able to start at all, to be able to know what build I'm on or what the update number was that started this, so I'm afraid I'm not really able to provide much to go on in that regard. All I know for sure is i must get this rig back into some kind of usable form in order to comb through it and pull out all the things that must be backed up if a OS reinstall is my only way forward, so any help to get my desktop environment back would be a HUGE help and greatly appreciated.