Resolved Black Screen and CMD Window, But No Desktop

Hello. Before posting this, I've tried finding a solution for my problem by doing many searches on these and other forums. I did find a couple of posts here with users experiencing similar problems as me, however none have had a solution that has worked for me.
Long story short, I let a friend use my laptop for a few hours to check/send emails, complete a resume, and whatever other miscellaneous tasks. After I got the laptop back, I turned it on and (I was not looking at the computer during start-up) it automatically began the integrated system repair feature of Windows 7. Apparently a previous attempt to boot wasn't successful. So from the choices I was given from the main repair menu, I chose the first option - automatic startup repair. This ran for 15 minutes or so then once complete prompted me to restart the machine, which I did. Windows then loaded as it normally did and I signed in. Instead of seeing my desktop on the screen, I now have a black background and two .cmd windows in the upper-left corner of my screen and the only thing showing in both windows is a command prompt and path (c: \windows\system32>).
There are no error messages that show, and continued reboots still give me the same result - no desktop and 2 cmd windows on a black background. I booted from my windows 7 install disc (which I converted to a usb flash drive installer) and manually launched startup repair, however it reported that no problems were found. But the laptop will not load my desktop after I sign in. Not sure what the best way is to go about fixing this problem, and don't know what happened that caused this issue in the first place. Help would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks.

EDIT: If I just let the machine sit at idle on the black screen that has 2 cmd windows, for maybe 3 or 4 minutes, then a small widow opens in the center of my screen saying something about needing to update a component in .net framework 4. and not to turn off the machine until that update has completed. If finishes in just a minute or two. But there are no noticeable changes.

 

Last Known Good Config and Safe Mode both result in the same situation as normal boot. Black screen with 2 small command prompt windows in the top left corner, and no desktop.

Also, If I hit ctrl-alt-del and open task manager I can see there are only a handful of processes running (maybe 6 or 7) and explorer, desktop window manager, and other desktop related processes are not running.

 

No. Nothing visible happens. Since I was in task manager I collected some details:


There are 2 applications are running:
1.) c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe
2.) cmd.exe /k start cmd.exe

There are 7 processes showing:
1.)cmd.exe
2.)cmd.exe
3.)conhost.exe
4.)conhost.exe
5.)csrss.exe
6.)taskmgr.exe
7.)winlogon.exe

bottom of task manager shows "processes: 30" and if I click Show Processes From All Users then nothing visible happens.

 

Yes. Also have it on flash drive.

 

I followed the instructions given at your link, but I was unable to get SETUP.EXE to run from within Windows. I tried with the disk and the flash drive. When i try to run SETUP.EXE, I receive an error message that says "D:\SETUP.EXE The dependency service or group failed to start." So then I booted from the Windows 7 DVD, however when I choose the upgrade option (as instructed to do so by your provided link), setup tells me that to perform this action I must run SETUP.EXE from within Windows. Which like I said, did not work.

That was a good suggestion though, I really thought that was going to work. What should I do at this point?

 

Okay, I followed these instructions. Everything was fine until I got to the step:

sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows

First response was "Beginning system scan. This process will take some time. "
Then after about a minute "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation. "

I continued with the instructions anyway. When the laptop rebooted and I logged on I tried to run SETUP.EXE and again the same error as before "D:\SETUP.EXE The dependency service or group failed to start. "

This has really got me confused, I have no clue what the problem could be (or what caused it!).

 

Unfortunately, I tried that first and it didn't work. I THOUGHT that I had System Restore enabled but when I tried to do a Restore through the Recovery Options it said that there weren't any restore points.

 

Okay things are getting weird now. I don't know why or how, but now when I log on to windows I don't have the cmd windows that were there before. Now it's just all black. I can hit ctrl-alt-del and bring up task manager, so I did that. Then I tried to run new task cmd but nothing happened. No error message, but no cmd window either. I've rebooted and tried Last Known Good Configuration but it didn't change anything. I've tried running several other things from task manager but the only thing I tried and actually worked was notepad. I looked in the services tab of task manager and I saw that most of the services are in the stopped state. Except for a handful that are running every other service is stopped. I tried to manually start some of them but every time I get an error. Something about permissions and dependencies. This is beginning to get a little frustrating. Is there another approach I can try?

 

Ok so I was finally successful at enabling the administrator account using the regedit method. And I was then successful at running SETUP.EXE from the Windows 7 DVD while logged on as administrator. Navigated through the setup, and when given the choice of Upgrade or Custom install, chose Upgrade and was totally sure it was going to be a piece of cake from this point. BUT NO. That would be too good to be true. LoL. Instead I had a window pop up notifying me that "You cannot upgrade from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate...." and so on. I should have seen that coming!

Anyway, I'm going to try one last time to repair this before I bite the bullet and do a clean install, as Arie suggests. The only reason I haven't already done that is because I have so much data that I will need to backup (in so many locations) that it's going to require a lot of my time.

Evan Omo thank you for your assistance up to this point. I appreciate it.

If you have one last-resort suggestion for me, I'm willing to give it a shot. If not, or if it is unsuccessful I'll be backing up and wipe and install.

 

Alright then. Thanks for trying! So should I mark this thread as resolved?