A Certain class of win 7 dialog screens contains blank content

Question

I'm not getting any content in several places including:

• Windows Task Manager (tabs are really tiny. Nothing in lists)
• Symantec
• Skype (tried reinstalling)
• System Restore

Even Gmail was causing a crash in IE9, and partial rendering in Chrome.

Seems like some subsystem that these programs hook into has corrupted. Is there a good way to repair this behaviour?

When did this start being a problem? I powered the laptop off as I was in a rush (not a graceful close). Restarted, and it said "repair"? I let it try to repair, and after waiting for a long time, I decided to restart and see if it would started up normally. Subsequently, I have let it install a windows update. Had issues with skype before the update, so, I assume that some subsystem is broken.

A "system restore" is not possible right now, as I can't see any content inside the screens that I'd use to start off that action.

Answer 1

I limped by for the last four weeks. Had to go back to the dos prompt for a number of things.

Today, I applied some Windows Updates this morning, rebooted, and now everything works again. Thanks Microsoft for fixing it up. I suspect that Microsoft may have caused the issue... but nevermind, that's the first issue I've had with their autoupdates in about 2 years since updating to Win 7 from XP.

Before it wasn't nearly this good. Infact, I suspected everything else but the auto updates. None of this is confirmed. Just glad that it is working again now.