I returned from the Thanksgiving holiday to find my new PC with a black desktop. It wasn’t the Black Screen of Death; there were (a few) icons on the desktop, and the PC was functioning normally, it was just that my desktop appeared to be a photo of a very deep cave at midnight during a new moon. Perhaps a remnant of Black Friday?
Artist's rendering of my black desktop
At first, I thought it was an issue with Windows activation, since that can cause the desktop to go black if Windows hadn’t been properly activated during install. That was not the case, since there was no activation warning in the lower right of the screen, plus I have system updates turned on, which requires the Windows genuine advantage tool (or the Windows 7 version of it, anyway). I also noticed that fonts didn’t look quite right. The smoothness of the fonts in the Windows Explorer were gone, and most other fonts looked jagged as well.
After I started poking around, I found there was a dialog that had been minimized telling me that my trial version of Norton AntiVirus had expired. Surely, they wouldn’t black out my desktop and screw with my fonts over that, would they?
Short answer: yes. I had planned on testing out Microsoft Security Essentials, so I uninstalled Norton, and lo, the desktop reappeared! After restarting the desktop came back, the fonts were smooth as a baby’s bumper cushions, and all was right with the world.
The chances of me extending my Norton trial? Very close to zero. There are ways of communicating with your users other than messing with fonts and desktop backgrounds. Not cool.