Windows 7 "Black Screen of Death" rears its ugly head...

By now a lot of PC users have made the switch to Windows 7, being that it is clearly lightyears ahead of Vista in terms of usability and stability... or is it?

Most recently, the "Black Screen of Death" has made its presence felt among the Windows 7 community.
The result is a machine that boots up to a black desktop with a mouse cursor.
No taskbar.
No icons.
In some cases even CTRL-ALT-DEL does absolutely zip.

Thankfully, the boffins over at Prevx have come up with a patch that should resolve most (but not all) cases of the problem. To quote their site:

1) Restart your PC
2) Logon and wait for the black screen to appear
3) Make sure your PC should be able to connect to the internet (black screen does not appear to affect this)
4) Press the CTRL, ALT and DEL keys simultaneously
5) When prompted, Click Start Task Manager
6) In Task Manager Click on the Application Tab
7) Next Click New Task
8) Now enter the command:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" "http://info.prevx.com/download.asp?GRAB=BLACKSCREENFIX"

NB: If the Task Manager does not appear after step 4, restart the PC and hit F8 before Windows starts to load, then select "Safe mode with Networking", and continue from step 5.

9) Click OK and your browser should start up and begin the download process
10) When prompted for the download Click run, the black screen fix program will download and run to automatically fix the issue.
11) Now restart your PC and the black screen problem will hopefully be gone.

Hopefully... it certainly worked for me!