I found for myself that a USB device was stopping it all. As soon as I unplugged it I had vista in safe mode back. I am using vista ultimate.
I am just restarting my pc as I type on this one I think it may have fixed it

Thanx a lot mate! Your solution (registry) worked just fine, thanx again.

For me, I can't seems to find the Shell thing. When I go into the regedit, under the Winlogon, I can't seems to find the Shell...

Please advise as this Black screen is killing me!

"Shell" is in the right side panel, NOT in the folder tree!
So when you click on "winlogon" check the right panel!
If it's not listed there, you're probably into another kind of trouble o-0

Yep this does it for me ... thought i was golden, but problem keeps reoccurring.
This does fix it but only temporarily for me & mine.

The run windows explorer worked thanks!

Just had this problem today. Found that the following fixed the problem:
On bootup press F8
Select the Repair option (already highlighted. I missed it to start with thinking it was a heading).
On the program that loads choose the option to restore.
On the list of restore points choose one from a few days earlier when you computer was last working. (My last restore point had been created the day before the problem and was created due to a Windows update so assume this must have caused the problem.)
Once the restore has finished you should be able to login as normal.

hey guys i have really good news i just had the same problem with vista. when i started up my computer only the documents menu showed up and black screen. then i searched for hours to try to fix it on google. the one time i searched this guy said to dwonload this auto runs program and do some stuff. well i did that and it did absolutletly nothing, but i noticed that there were two C:/windows files trying to run and one of them said FILE NOT FOUND. so i deleted that from auto startup and restarted it. IT ACTUALLY WORKED. Tutorial---download auto runs here



1)Autoruns | System Resources Tune-Up. Download | PC World

ok if that doesnt download then if u can find the download somewhere else u should do it.

2)after downloaded open and run "autoruns"

3)make sure your on the everything tab

4)look under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell

5)look for C:/windows(might be different)
and to the right it will say file not found

6)right click and delete that

7)restart your computer and it should be back to normal

8)if that doesnt work then it may be hardware realated problems then just dongrade to xp then update to vista again with cd's

if u have any questions or concerns contact me on aim-je6203

or email me at je6203@aol.com

Thank you so much i look at this fix and it worked the regedit fix so thank you so much if other people need a little help maybe this will help you the thing that caused mine was
xDesk 2 - Dreamscene Replacement

My Method of Repair:

Boot into vista (using the recovery cd)

Then move to c:\windows\system32\drivers\ (delete vga.sys, vgapnp.sys) and windows\system32\drivers\pci.sys

Started the recovery cd again; and "attempted the repair." this appeared to work in this situation.