(PHOTO) Welcome Screen Gibberish Font Error Message Can't Log In

Hi. I've been experiencing a very bizarre problem for the last couple of days. After restarting Win7 it gets to the login screen (the one that says "Windows 7" at the bottom) that is supposed to show the available profiles. But no profiles are shown. After about 30 seconds an error message pops up that appears to be in the "Wingdings" or some similar font. It's gibberish. I can't find any info on this anywhere. If anyone has any clue I'd appreciate it.

I was able to get into a command prompt by booting to the repair console thing from the Windows disc. Startup repair did nothing. I tried the fix mbr, rebuild bcd, and fix boot commands and they didn't help. I actually started getting a black screen at bootup that saied winload.exe cannot be verified. I seem to have "fixed" that but now am back at this error message. It's the oddest thing I've ever seen.

It does the same with "safe mode" (minus the error message) and even with "last know good...".

Here's a pic for you native Wingdings speakers out there Also, the cursors stays on screen and can be moved, plus every few seconds the screen flashes black very quickly. Does the error message look familiar to anyone (except for the font used of course). Note that going into the repair disc and using start-up repair did nothing.

Looks like a virus to me. If you could get into safe mode try Malwarebytes Antimalware. As you can't, try using Windows Defender Offline. This will scan your PC for viruses without needing windows.

Stephen

Problem solved.

I tried the Windows Defender Offline but got an error saying that it "couldn't scan this computer" or something similar. This led me to research the problem and I discovered it may be a bad registry entry. Then I discovered how to do a manual system restore by going into a command line from the Win7 CD and copying all the files from c:\window\system32\config\regback to c:\windows\system32\config. That did the trick and the profiles loaded fine. All my programs work so far, etc. Needless to say I immediately created a restore point once getting back in windows.

Thanks for the advice. It helped. In a completely different way than intended, but still

Glad you managed to sort it.