Aero theme stopped working after a crash...system resto

I have window 7 64 bit on my high end computer. the computer has been great for a few months- i really like the aero features. tonight i installed the game Batman arkam asylum. while i was benchmarking the game froze up. The windows button, control alt delete, alt tab did nothing. so i turned the pc off. when i started it up- i noticed the aero effect was gone- so i did a quick system restore. system restore then crashed and said it could not restore. i tried this twice plus i tried another restore point. i spent all night researching the problem on this site and the internet. i came up with nothing. the computer still has a registry entry for DWM but the app does not load on start up. it has disappeared from the windows services GUI. i tried to select other themes- this did not work. i tried the Aero trouble shooting app and i came up with nothing. i re ran the performance test to try to force Aero back on. I am now out of ideas!! please help!

just noticied that in the lower right hand corner of my desktop it says:
windows 7
build 7600
this copy of windows is not genuine??

i have a genuine version of windows and i have never seen this before!!
i just ran a sfc /sannow and there was no error detected.

ps- the system drivers are completely up to date.
i7920
asus rampage extreme II
NVIDIA geforce gtx 295
12GB ram
you get the idea....

Welcome Daniel Joy, I would suggest a Repair Install Since sfc/ scannow found nothing.

any drawbacks to a repair install? i cant harm my data can? thanks for the help

Daniel Joy said:

any drawbacks to a repair install? i cant harm my data can? thanks for the help

No it will keep all your programs and settings, It's all in the tutorial, just follow that.

good job guys! that did the trick. i still have a bit of weird ness going on but i think a driver sweep and reinstall of graphics drivers will help..
the only problem i had is that i could not do step 18 of the tutorial. there simply was no check box to delete those files. i searched for the files manually but they are not present. i do have around 10gb less hd space since i reinstalled. any idea whats going on?

Daniel Joy said:

good job guys! that did the trick. i still have a bit of weird ness going on but i think a driver sweep and reinstall of graphics drivers will help..
the only problem i had is that i could not do step 18 of the tutorial. there simply was no check box to delete those files. i searched for the files manually but they are not present. i do have around 10gb less hd space since i reinstalled. any idea whats going on?

When you do a disk clean up, click clean system files and it will show up so you can delete it. Glad to hear you got it fixed.