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Explorer.exe & Acmon.exe APPCRASH at start-up ->blank screen w/ cursor
Background - I only know enough about troubleshooting to make me dangerous, but I have decent-enough Google-fu.
Computer - ASUS G Series G53SW-XN1 running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.
Issue - The computer wasn't reading a SDHC card inserted into that slot, so I restarted. Upon restarting, Explorer.exe stopped responding and closed (APPCRASH) x2, followed by Acmon.exe doing the same (once). After that, the screen remains blank with a cursor. I can still access task manager, but I can't start a new instance of Explorer. The computer just sits there (on one occasion, some Adobe tool also crashed after like 20 minutes of sitting there).
The same thing happens (Explorer crashes twice and Acmon crashes and the computer sits on the blank screen with the cursor) each time I restart, regardless of whether it's in safe mode or normal mode. I never see my desktop and presumably can't run any programs (at least none that I've tried).
Troublehooting thus far - I've tried starting in safe mode multiple times with the same result. I've tried System Restore, but unfortunately I had that disabled. I tried Repairing Windows, it said there were no issues to repair. I tried doing a Memory Diagnostic, but when the computer restarted, this same thing happened, so I never saw the results.
I restarted once in Safe Mode w/ Command, and ran chkdsk, with no errors being reported. I also used Command to uninstall the "Splendid" utility (at least I think I uninstalled it...never uninstalled a program this way, and I'm still getting the Acmon.exe message, which doesn't make sense to me if I uninstalled Splendid) as I read that can fix the Acmon.exe issue in Asus machines.
Not really sure what to do next. I've been trying to fix this issue myself for the past two days by searching Google and trying to use solutions to problems that aren't the same as mine, but I've had no success. When I left for work this morning, I left the computer on the blank screen just to see what happened while I was away, as I heard Acmon can cause "really slow" startup...so I'm hoping that maybe my startup is just really, really slow with this issue (I've previously let it sit on the blank screen for ~1 hour). I'm expecting to see a blank screen when I get home, though.
As a bit of further background, frequently, when I leave the computer on for 1-2 hours without using it, I get a BSoD. I've had various issues with the graphics package in the last year or so that I've (probably poorly) fixed on my own as they've arisen, and it sounds like Acmon errors are common with the Asus graphics package. So that makes sense. I probably should have been more pro-active with figuring out the graphics card issue before I had this big of a problem, but I wasn't...
Any thoughts/ideas/steps to take from here? Help would be greatly appreciated.
I'm pretty lousy at troubleshooting, so please don't assume I know too much with your response. However, I can read tutorials and FAQ as necessary, so links to info can suffice instead of a long written explanation.