Windows 10 Unknown Glitch After Restart (No Icons + Empty Control Panel + Broken Internet + Other)

[Mihail Garabedov]

I honestly have no idea what happened, ive never seen anything like this before. Ive had this pc for less than a year and its always had some small problems. The network settings would sometimes stop responding, freesing any and all browsers i have open, chrome, firefox and even edge just froze. A restart would normally fix this, and that is what i tried today but it didnt do what i expected at all. After booting my computer back up the first think i noticed whas that all the icons were gone, im talking about the actual pictures, the names were still there (and where the only way for me to actually open the programs) another thing i found out was that right click > propperties does nothing, it just does nothing. The internet had completley screwed up, it connected but would leave browsers constantly loading whenever i try doing anything at all. Finally, and most jarring of all- the control panel is blank, no icons, no text, just an empty page. There could be more things i havent seen yet but so far im at a loss, ive been searching for my receipt as i have a warranty but cant find it + if i can fix this quickly and on my own thatd be great.

(Ive already tried asking in the microsoft comunity but they havent been able to help + ive already tried the system file checker and all it said was "Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.")

 

[Trouble]

Hello and welcome to the forum.
Do you have a backup of all your critical data?
There are multiple troubleshooting steps that you might be able to perform, if you boot from the installation media and use the "Repair your PC" link on the second page.
IF it were mine....
The first thing that I would probably try is creating a new user account as a member of the local administrators group to see if the problem was unique to my profile or if it was global across all profile.

Go to
C:\Windows\System32
Find
Cmd.exe (if you are hiding file extensions it may only say "cmd")
Right click it and choose run as administrator
At the admin command prompt type
net user JohnSmith /add
hit enter
then type
net localgroup administrators JohnSmith /add
hit enter
type
exit
hit enter
Restart and log in as JohnSmith