How do I fix Windows 10 after anniversary update where it draws almost everything as black on black?

Question

After updating to Windows 10 anniversary edition it seems OK on first glance, I get to the login page, I enter my pincode, and it moves forward.

Then, everything is black. Well, almost everything. I can see the windows 10 upgrade advisor but only because I can read the title of the window. Everything else is black.

If I right-click just on the outside of the advisor window, just above one of the corners, I can see the corner and part of the vertical edge disappearing (painted black) in what I assume to be the context menu for the desktop.

Sure enough, if I pick the bottommost item (by guessing) of this menu I get the personalisation window for Windows 10. In there text and colors are readable. If I pick the theme settings, hoping the theme has been corrupted, another black window is opened up.

So how do I fix this?

Answer 1

This was due do the video driver either being corrupt, being installed for a previous edition of Windows 10, or partially replaced by standard files by the upgrade process.

To fix this I did the following.

1. On another computer, I visited nVidia webpage and download the latest Geforce driver package
2. Still on this other computer, I extracted this package. Yes, it comes as a .exe file but it contains an archive, I used 7-zip to do this if the archive isn't actually "zip". If you have 7-zip installed (or something similar) simply right-click the exe file and look for the extract/unzip menu item.
3. I made the files available on the computer. I did this by uploading the files using TeamViewer. I could also have made them available using a USB drive but with an USB drive I would have to remember exactly what drive letter it would have, since I had TeamViewer installed and running (and with a locked-in password) it was very easy.

4. I executed the setup file and asked it to run silently, which will automate the entire process, by:

   1. Hitting Win+R to open up the black "Run" window

   2. Typing in d:\temp\setup.exe -s

      Note that D:\Temp was where I had placed my files, you will have to change your path according to how you made the setup files available on the computer.

   3. Hitting enter
   4. A Windows 10 trust dialog pops up, readable in fact, and I could say that yes, allow the setup to modify files on my computer.
5. Wait. About a minute later, the screen refreshed and everything was ok again.