No Desktop icons, hourglass in taskbar

That would be nice. No way to create a new user. No way to do anything at all except look at the nice photo of the windows rock.
I can get to power options via Ctrl-Alt-Del. That's about all I can do with this machine.

I'm going to pull the drive and look at it with another machine. Then call it quits for now. Tomorrow is another day.

 

Boy Tony you get all the cool ones hope you get it sorted out. Very interesting this is new to me also haven't run into this yet.

 

The machine does have another user account. Using Ctrl-Alt-Del, I can get to the Switch User option. It didn't show any other user to switch to.

Last night I ran a full chkdsk with the drive out of the desktop and connected to one of my machines. No errors were found. Today, with the drive connected to one of my machines, I did a malware scan of the drive. Nothing noted.

Just started the Media Creation tool to create a new W10 USB install drive.

 

No joy again. The command executed successfully. Shut down and boot. It went to the user's profile. Then I did a Ctrl-Atl-Del to get to Switch User. No other users showed up. I even did a Shift-Shut down to clear out the caches.

I'm thinking I can use this install drive to reinstall W10. There should be the option to keep applications and files. I'll backup the user files first.

 

No login screen to choose a profile. It goes automatically directly to Barbara's profile.

When I clicked on Switch User, I was presented with Barbara and the Sign In button underneath her name. The only option is to click on the sign in button.

 

The Windows logo is there where it should be in the corner of the taskbar. However, when I bring the cursor to the taskbar, the cursor turns into an hourglass and becomes useless. This thing is messed up.

See if you can open this file https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ATh9E_PstaQhrr2KyQF-NV4NH_rvM2G4/view?usp=sharing

 

How about that. I can post a video from my Google Drive. Never done that before.

btw: the cursor is so big because the user has a vision problem.

 

Thanks Rustys. I haven't tried using the Install to do an install yet. Still backing up files. I'll get back to ya.

 

Booted to the W10 install drive. I don't see what you're referring to Rustys. I got to the part to do the installation and was hopeful when it asked if I wanted to do an Upgrade Install which would keep settings, files, and applications. The excitement was building. Then it said the Upgrade options isn't available if you start your computer using Windows installation media. It said if I wanted to do the Upgrade Install I needed to get Windows started normally. Well, that's not happening.

 

Yeah, I know you mentioned that. I had to try. I was hopeful.
In the old days, I'd copy the system, software, sam, security, and default files from Windows\repair to the System32\config folder. I don't see those backup files in W10.