Situation: Windows Vista, latest updates. After restarting to complete an installation, I find myself looking at a totally black windows desktop without any icons. The start menu and taskbar, including quickstart icons, appears. Some, but not all task bar tray icons appear. The systems seems stable.

When I open Windows Explorer and click "desktop" in the folder treeview, the cursor immediately jumps back to the previously selected item. No error. Same when clicking on my user's profile or my documents. When I try "save as" in, say, Notepad, nothing happens, the dialog box (which defaults to "my documents") doesn't even show. Again, no error.

Nothing serious afaict in the event log. Typing something in Start > Search shows "Search failed to initialize". Most programs, including Internet Explorer, Firefox etc work as expected.

Anybody ever encountered such abomination?