After booting up (I even get the full ME logo screen during start-up), my screen shows a blue/black checkerboard with no icons or start button. Right and left mouse clicking does nothing. I can move the mouse arrow around, but can't get out of the checkerboard screen. I did a safe boot and reinstalled ME, but still the same blue/black checkerboard after start-up. My monitor settings must be okay because I got full screen graphics when I reloaded ME and also momentarily whenever I start up ME. Any thoughts?

Have you looked at your BIOS lately?

i also get same thing but then it loads the taskbar and desktop without a problem. i removed check marks from active destop >>properties>> show web contents ... and changed the bmp file to none from desktop>>prop>>background..and the problem is gone. bye

Funny you mention that, it sounds like a background pix. I think on ME there is a checkerboard (black and red colors) that can be used as a background.

When I frist installed a new graphics card in my system the checker board (Blue & black ) was exactly what my desktop looked like , untill I adjusted the resolution , why he is not showing any desktop icons , Iam not sure perhaps somehow he deleted the icons off his desktop. My frist try would be a adjustment to resize the screen to 1,024 x 768 pixels !

Thanks for the great ideas! How can I adjust the screen resolution when there is no start button, no icons, and the checkerboard screen is unresponsive to any keystrokes?

Do you have X-Teq software installed? There is an option to start with a BLANK desktop.