Awesome Techs

Earlier PrevX, UK-based software security firm, claimed that the main cause of Windows Black Screen Of Death was recent Microsoft Windows Updates. Yesterday they posted an entry in their blog saying that, changes in the Windows Registry that trigger the behaviour might be caused by malware or some other factor, which it is yet to pin down, but not the Windows update.

The Blog Post Says,

The issue appears to be related to a characteristic of the Windows Registry related to the storage of string data. In parsing the Shell value in the registry, Windows requires a null terminated “REG_SZ” string. However, if malware or indeed any other program modifies the shell entry to not include null terminating characters, the shell will no longer load properly, resulting in the infamous Black Screen with the PC showing only the My Computer folder.

They also apologized for the earlier blog post which pointed out the Microsoft Security Update was the reason.

We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused. This has been a challenging issue to identify. Users who have the black screen issue referred to can still safely use our free fix tool to restore their desktop icons and task bar.

Microsoft was sure about that, the updates were not the reason behind this. They pointed out this at their technet blog post. It says,

We’ve conducted a comprehensive review of the November Security Updates, the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and the non-security updates we released through Windows Update in November. That investigation has shown that none of these updates make any changes to the permissions in the registry. Thus, we don’t believe the updates are related to the “black screen” behavior described in these reports.

See here for the earlier Reports regarding this.