tom howarth

I had a VM that whenever you tried to access the console or RDP into the server it just displayed a black screen as shown below


You could do a ctrl-alt-del and if you tabbed just right, and it was a big if, you could log into the server. Once logged in the server functioned correctly. Well I did the standard Google searches and checked out Microsoft's knowledgebase but had no luck. I knew it must have something to do with the default profile as that is the one that is loaded before a user logs on.

So how do you fix this issue?

Once you are actually logged on to the server, load RegEdit and navigate to "HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors".


All the colours have defaulted to 0 0 0 this is Black, so the server had a black background, black text entry boxes, black text, black buttons etc.

How was this caused?

having spoken to Microsoft they happily informed me that this was caused by the system drive running out of space. This rather bizarely for a comment from Microsfoft, made complete sense, as my system drive had indeed run out of space, my disk space issue was caused by a miss configured App-V installation, all my fault , I stupidly placed the content directory on the C:\, then managed to fill up the drive, with sequenced application packages. Oh well lesson learnt. I created a new drive and set that up as the content share and moved the packages out.

Now to correct the issue

Navigate to the following regkey "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors" key, this happens to be profile colour setting of the currently logged on user.


Select File/Export


And save it as a *.reg file to the desktop,

Load this up in notepad and change the following line:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors

To read

HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Colors

Save the file.

Next double click the .reg file

and accept the two message forms

If you are successful you will receive a message stating the the Key has bee sucessfully imported. Click OK.

Now log off and your console will now be back to normal

Panic over.