no taskbar and no icons

I have installed Windows 7 Pro on my second hard drive (no secondary partitions) using a custom install. My primary OS is Win XP on my other drive. All goes well in the install and everything looks great and as long as I do a warm boot I have no problems.

The trouble happens when I cold boot. I choose Windows 7 from the options of Win 7 or the old OS and I see no desktop icons (yes, they are checked to appear using the right click on the desktop) and no taskbar. I can right click and do anything that menu offers me on the desktop but I get nothing I can use to run anything (no taskbar, no start menu, no anything). The install went perfectly so there are no error messages to lead me to a problem. I have installed no other software just the OS. I have tried to cold boot with the Win 7 DVD in the drive and out of it and get the same exact thing.

If anyone can shed some light on this odd problem, I'd be most grateful.

BTW: the upgrade advisor gave me the go ahead on installing Win 7 on my system

something is wrong when it is trying to execute the exeplorer.exe


Alt, Ctrl, Del and go to your task manager ; click on File (New Task) Run and execute explorer.exe

just for the time being... and we can work from there, at least you can get the icons back

When I use ctrl + alt + del I get a black screen and that is it. It never shows anything else. I have even tried reinstalling Win 7 multiple times on a clean drive and have the same problem on a cold boot.

And there is the problem - no taskbar and no icons = no ability to get to the OS on a cold boot.

Thanks for checking but I am running XP Pro on my other drive not Vista and have NO taskbar or icons on the desktop of 7 when I try to boot to it. Today someone I work with suggested researching black screen of death - what I get on a ctrl + alt + del on 7. After I try some other things I'll post what I find here.