Hi all! Been searching everywhere for an answer to this issue and found this thread via Google search...
My problem is very similar to this one, yet a bit different. Starts the same - boot laptop (HP DV6500), get to login screen - enter password, then goes to blank screen with just a cursor. I wait a moment then hit CTL-ALT-DEL to get to 'start task manager', kill the explorer.exe process and start a new one. That gets me my desktop back but almost with a limited capacity. Some programs will not open, network availability does not show even though I'm able to browse the internet wirelessly. This all goes on for about 15 - 20 minutes when, all of a sudden, things come back to life and the laptop is perfectly normal again. I've tried system restore to no avail. The registry Winlogon entry for 'shell' reads 'explorer.exe' only as it should, according to similar fixes I've found. I've also messed with startup programs and stopped some unimportant programs from starting but that didn't fix anything either so it's back to normal bootup now. This is on Vista Home Premium on a laptop we've had for only 5 days.