Control Panel Empty Issue

[prafullanayana]

I recently upgraded one of my Windows XP desktop to windows Vista. Everything is working good but don’t know why many times my Control Panel becomes completely empty . There used to be no icons or options, no matter I view it as Classic or normal mode. This happens most of the time but the icons come back after hitting F5 four to five times. Also when accessed from start menu in show as menu mode it's just empty. If accessed from explorer it has a much reduced number of icons.

Is it just me facing this problem or anyone else? Hope this is not Vista’s problem. Any help on this will be appreciated.

[lopa]

Wow.. I though I was alone with this annoying problem but finally I got a company. You are not alone with the said problem friend, count me in too. In my case this is brand new desktop with Windows Vista Home Premium. Many times when I open Control Panel it flashes empty for a brief second and close. No matter how many times I try refreshing the window, it icons wont appear. The only solution to bring them back is by reboot.

While troubleshooting I also noticed several times that when this problem appears, even the "personalize" link after right clicking the desktop will not load either. I guess this is somewhere related to Control Panel? Any idea?

[prafullanayana]

Atleast rebooting fixes your problem, lopa, but in my case no matter how many times I reboot if it has to appear without icons, it will appear. Many times even refreshing the window wont bring it back. The only way for me is delete the CONTROL.EXE-817F8F1D.pf file in the windows\prefetch folder and rebooting fixes.

But this is not the permanent fix, right? Hope somebody from here can provide the permanent fix. Many thanks.

[Andrus K]

Hey guys, I had this problem in past on my Vista Home as well. After trying many troubleshootints finally I managed to fix the same. I don’t know whether it will work for you guys also but you can give it a try. This is what I did:

I went to Control Panel and rather than left clicking, I right clicked and chose Explore. It opened right up.

See it works for you both.

[HudSon]

Same here guys, even my control panel items disappears most of the time. Hope MS is aware of the same. Anyways, I am still having the problem, tried several things but nothing fixed the issue permanently so far. So what i use to do when i need any program to launch is open them directly from command prompt by running the commands like control panel items directly (ncpa.cpl, desk.cpl, sysdm.cpl) they launch fine, whereas others (appwiz.cpl, firewall.cpl) still refuse to load... As you guys said, this is temporary fix, hope Microsoft released some patch soon to get rid of this annoying issue.

[Maee]

Hello prafullanayana. As you said deleting the Prefetch file helps, you might try stopping and disabling the "Superfetch" service and restarting to see if that helps. If not, just restart it and put it on automatic.

[Jaycub]

Control panel fix for Vista?

Hi Guys this is a problem i had with my new pc it's two days old running vista ultimate 32bit, and after booting to the desktop the control panel applets were missing games wouldn't launch, and the answer below i found on the MSDN forum i think his name was Joe, and from most of the answers i have looked at this worked the easiest for me

1) Launch services.msc from a run command
2) Find the SLUNotify service & stop it
3) Find the Software Licensing service & stop it (it may say that ReadyBoost needs that service to run; stop it anyway)
4) Restart both services, starting with Software Licensing

He went on to say no thanks to microsoft......

[lucifershetty]

I have had the same problem for past week and i have tried to do wht Jaycub suggested....but when i try to restart servivce ...it says " windows cannot find the service specified "

[cpd101]

The empty control panel issue after many clicks ended up an easy fix. Right click on Computer in start menu, then in left side panel, right click on control panel and select expand and all the options will be listed!