Yet another problem with black screen at vista startup

Along with countless others I'm getting a black screen (with cursor) at vista
startup. On my computer, however, after several minutes the black screen
goes away and I get to my desktop which is totally functional. I've read
countless posts about this problem without finding one explanation or one
solution. I just the day before this problem started downloaded a bunch of
updates, which seems to be a likely cause of this issue. I'll uninstall
these shortly. However, I find many references to using regedit....going to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogin, then
clicking on the "Shell" value (right pane) to insert Explorer.exe. I don't
have "Shell" on the right. There is an entry "(Default), type REG_SZ, Data
(value not set). Is this what I'm looking for? When I right click there is
no entry. In the right pane I also have "BuildNumber", "Exclude
ProfileDirs", "FirstLogon" and "ParseAutoexec" Help me with this anybody?

Floyd <Floyd@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>Along with countless others I'm getting a black screen (with cursor) at vista
>startup. On my computer, however, after several minutes the black screen
>goes away and I get to my desktop which is totally functional. I've read
>countless posts about this problem without finding one explanation or one
>solution. I just the day before this problem started downloaded a bunch of
>updates, which seems to be a likely cause of this issue. I'll uninstall
>these shortly. However, I find many references to using regedit....going to
>HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogin, then
>clicking on the "Shell" value (right pane) to insert Explorer.exe. I don't
>have "Shell" on the right. There is an entry "(Default), type REG_SZ, Data
>(value not set). Is this what I'm looking for? When I right click there is
>no entry. In the right pane I also have "BuildNumber", "Exclude
>ProfileDirs", "FirstLogon" and "ParseAutoexec" Help me with this anybody?

Umm... do that again. I suspect that you are in the WRONG key. My
"...\Winlogon" key has about two dozen entries.