ok the motherboard in my dell inspiron 4150 laptop went bad, just installed the new one and seems to be working ok except for the bios needs updated. but while the motherboard was downi needed to get some info off the hard drive and i had the set to private so i had to take ownership of the account through another pc. but now that i am putting it all back together it boots fine then when it gets to the login screen it just goes totally blank and makes the login sounds but nothing more. i am running win xp home with sp2. any ideas????
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Hi ...welcome to PCHF

When you get to the blank desktop...
ctrl/alt/delete/file/new task/explorer.exe/enter

should work.

Lost me ih8bills?? Don't understand what you mean.

He says it "boots fine-- gets to desktop-- no icons or taskbar"

so -- boot it up when you get to that "blank desktop"
press ctrl/alt/delete -- brings up task mananger--
what's probably happeneing is Windows Explorer is not loading
sometimes you can fix it by going to the file menu in Task manager
select "new task"
brings up a "run" type of window-- type in explorer.exe-- hit enter--- should start explorer again---

I was trying to avoid messing with recovery console-- or repair install...
I've had this issue-- but it was a log time ago.