Black screen on startup after pceu virus fix

It's possible that there are still remnants of the pceu virus hiding within your computer. Or some other virus/malware. Regardless of which anti-virus product you used to remove pceu, no anti-virus product is 100% effective 100% of the time (if there was such a thing we'd all be using it.) Suggest you run a couple more free on-demand scanners. The more "no malware found" results the more likely your machine really is malware free.

Windows Defender Offline (disk must be prepared on a machine with no malware)

Malwarebytes

ESET Online Scanner

HitmanPro

SuperAntispyware

It's also possible that the virus may ahve damaged or corrupted system files. Run a system file checker scan from an elevated command prompt (option two.) If problems are found, run the scan 3 times and reboot the computer after each scan.

SFC /SCANNOW Command - System File Checker

If the black screen issue hasn't been fixed, you can try a startup repair. Run this tool 3 times and restart the computer after each scan no matter what the results are.

Startup Repair

Finally, one of the Forum experts prepared a couple of troubleshooting tutorials with some additional suggestions.

Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Boot

Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7

before that, I suggest you to make a new admin user, maybe this is the problem with your user,

mmkarimi said:

before that, I suggest you to make a new admin user, maybe this is the problem with your user,

I have tried with different users, no problem there.

Kaktussoft said:

so ctrl-alt-delete works. Can you start explorer.exe there?

Yes. (I can run everything fine just like normal with "run", I am using that laptop right now)

Kaktussoft said:

Run regedit and goto key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Do you see this?
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
"ExcludeProfileDirs"="AppData\\Local;AppData\\LocalLow;$Recycle.Bin"
"BuildNumber"=dword:00001db1
"FirstLogon"=dword:00000000
"ParseAutoexec"="1"

Please check if it's the same. No "shell" entry there?

Yes, no "shell" entry.

Thank you guys for the quick replies as always.

Kaktussoft said:

When you run explorer.exe all desktop icons appear again? Also the system tray... everything is working then?

Only that user has problems... all other user accouns are working fine?

When I run explorer.exe it just opens a new explorer window and none of the usual thing happens so no icons / task bar / start button

I do have a cursor yes.

btw, the values in Winlogon in regedit are a bit different from yours:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
"ExcludeProfileDirs"="AppData\\Local;AppData\\LocalLow;$Recycle.Bin"
"BuildNumber"=dword:00001db0 (7600)
"FirstLogon"=dword:00000000 (0)
"ParseAutoexec"="1"

does this help at all?