PLEASE HELP: S10-3 Starts Up into Empty Black Screen [ Edited ]

[AlphaGator]

We just purchased an S10-3 (35U) for my daughter for Christmas.  I configured it last week (initial setup, windows updates, installed Panda anti-virus, etc) and shut it down.  

I started it tonight to add additional memory (yes, I've read the 100's of posts about upgrading memory on this netbook), and after closing the VeriFace box on the login screen the netbook finishes loading windows, but there is no desktop or anything...just a completely blank back screen with a mouse pointer.  I let it "rest" for a while to see if it was working on something, but the LEDs were doing nothing, so it wasn't processing anything.

Oddly, when I press CTRL-ALT-DEL, it opens the blue screen as it normally would.  I ran task manager and found that explorer.exe was indeed running (I thought this might be the issue).  

So, I shut it down and restarted.  Same thing.

I did the hard reset (battery pull and held the power button for 30s) and restarted, but no progress.

Any ideas?  Am I going to have to resort to the OKR?

I need to get this thing going before Christmas (this is my 9 year old's Santa present).

Thank you.

[donvaz]

If you have not yet yet added any new hardware to it then it must be some software config issue.  Have you tried starting it into safe mode and using system restore?

[yigit]

try to remove/replace or swap memory sticks, update bios.

if it doesn't help, remove the memory stick you added and check if it works ( could me memory issue )

post back the results.