Windows 7: Windows 7.. no text.. no menus.. nothing

Hi. For some reason, on my laptop, I can no longer see any text on the desktop, nor anywhere else. I cant see menus either. Cant access my start menu.
It is almost the same issue, as this person was having in this post:

Win7 x64: no text on desktop, can't access start menu

Does anyone have any ideas about how I can fix this? Its really frustrating.
I even tried to boot in safe mode.. but its the same thing there too.
I cant restore.. cuz I cant see what anything says. I cant change display properties, cuz I cant see anything... PLEASE HELP!!

Hi and welcome to the Forum.
Has this problem just arisen? If so what did you do immediately before this happened? Are you running an up to date AV?

the problem is, is that, its not my laptop. it is a friend of mines, who just asked me to take a look at it & see if I can see what the problem was. SO I dunno what anyone was doing right before all the stuff happened.
So.. is he kinda screwed then, or what?
I wanted to just do a system restore, but when I bring up the restore menu..I can see some stuff..I click on the restore button and then some screen pops up.. with a yellow caution triangle thing.. but the page is blank, so I dunno what it is trying to ask me or tell me or what..
Is there any other solution?
Did I mention that I cant access the start menu either?

What does "I can see some stuff." mean. It tells me nothing!
When you say
"then some screen pops up.. with a yellow caution triangle thing.. but the page is blank,"
If the page is blank how come you can see a yellow triangle.
You really do need to think before posting and give us some detail that makes sense. Read your post before posting and think soewone is going to read it who cannot see the laptop!

Hi, I am having exactly the same issue on the PC of my brother in law.
Seems to be something that arose since a week or 2 weeks.

Exactly same symptoms as in first post.
I see the icons on the desktop but no texts to them.
When starting Windows Explorer, I see icons for directories and files but no texts to show the filename or any other stuff.
The icons in program windows are also very small in height.

I happened to have Total Commander on that system and managed to start it by searching (almost blindly but for the icons) for its .exe icon. Total Commander allows me to browse reasonably normal as the 2 windows with drive info are normally filled. With the menu at the top however I have the same problem: no texts.

I ran Kapersky Rescue Disk 10 which removed some viruses and also some java cache stuff. After that I did the Samsung recovery offered under F4 at start-up (in parallel to the F2-Setup), and did the "basic recovery". This does not help.
I looked at the Windows\Fonts directory but it was there and seemed in order.

Now I do not now how to proceed. What is f.e. the source of texts appearing in toolbars in application windows and below icons on the desktop?

Thanks for any help!

Hi,

My issue reported in the previous post has been resolved thanks to Nigel's blog: Fixing User Profiles in Vista and Windows 7

It may have been a user-profile issue.

What I did:
- enabled logging in as "hidden administrator" (net user administrator /active:yes)
- login as administrator
- run virusscan
- run virus bootscan
- run registry cleaner

I had several java trojans and malware on this machine.
Also had an lsass.exe in the root that was autostarted and had an extra executable on the same autostart line with a name something like pgdpgdpgdpgdpg.exe (not exact name) which was already removed by the virus scanner. So on start-up complained about it missing. That is how I found the lsass.exe file. I removed that one manually.
After that everything OK for the standard user too.
Disabled the "hidden administrator" through "net user administrator /active:no

Hope this helps others.