I noticed I had some disk errors on my HDD, so I ran chkdsk last night which corrected the problems. However, after reboot my desktop wallpaper no longer is displaying on the machine.

If I navigate to the wallpaper selection options under Personalization, I can browse and 'select' a new picture. However, nothing shows up on my actual desktop - just plain black background. Everything else about the machine is operating normally, including the sidebar.

I think there may have been a registry setting that is preventing the wallpaper from displaying, but I can't locate any threads that discuss how to resolve this or where to look. Note, I do not have any policy settings regarding the wallpaper on this machine.

OS is Vista Ultimate.

Thanks for your help.

i am having the same problem on vista premium 32 bit.

the background just disappeared, and i can go to change it, but even in the preview thumbnail, no picture shows up. i can still change my desktop background color without problem, images just will not show up.

i suspect a registry entry as well, but have no idea how to locate the right one to change/modify/delete...

is my problem the same as yours? no preview thumbnail?

It sounds as though we have the same symptoms. Mine started after noticing some disk errors, so I ran scndsk to correct the bad clusters on the HDD. Something in that process resulted in the strange behavior.

I got no where with MSFT support (via my MSDN account), so I just formatted the disk and reinstalled Vista from scratch. Works perfect now! ;-)

Not exactly the solution you were looking for though.

not really lol. this computer is a week old, and the desktop just disappeared. too small a problem with too new a computer to go that route yet.

but i've been asking around the web for days now, and haven't had one person who knows, or even thinks they know, how to solve this...

Hey.. i have the exact same issue.. had anasty virus that i managed to get rid of (trojan downloader) now i cant change my background either.. although supriseingly can change to single colors, i am using vista ultimate as well.

See if this repair works:
http://software.techrepublic.com.com/abstr...px?docid=344540

Try looking at:
Control Panel ----> Ease of Access Center ----> Make it easier to focus on tasks ----> In reading section make sure that "Remove Background Images" is not checked.
In case it wasn't and you still have the problem try looking at registry for something of this sort

PERFECT -- That fixed it for me. It started when I had vista 32bit on my laptop and it carried over when I upgraded to windows 7.

Thanks. Managed to fix my prob in seconds after reading this! Awesome.