Black screen with cursor after login

[DrRhubarb]

Hi,

We recently got a puzzling issue only affecting specific HP models (desktops as laptops) in a domain environment where you get a black screen with cursor after logging in. Trying to manually start Explorer.exe results in the error message "the line 708 cannot be found in DLL file C:\Windows\System32\Urlmon.dll".

So far, 14 of our computers are affected by this problem. 2 of which are installed with a standard image, the rest are installed with our custom image which haven't changed in recent months and works well on roughly 2k computers of different brands/models. No recent changes in GPO's either.

Some of the things we've already tried:

* Disabled services like App Readiness, App Deployment etc.
* Booting into Safe Mode.

* Selective boot, disabled all HP & Intel services.

* Memory reset.

* SFC scan, checkdisk, and dism.

* Logging into different accounts.

* Updated BIOS, updated/uninstalled drivers (graphics driver as well).

* Verified urlmon.dll is intact and registered by the system.

* OS re-installation.

There's no third-party software installed, and malware is out of the question. No error logs out of the ordinary to take notice of in Event Viewer. However, the problem seems to start after some ~20 Windows Updates (.NET one of them), but I've been unable to find any correlating bug reports from Microsoft regarding these.

So I'm at my wits end with this issue and wonder if someone's experienced the same problem in the recent months or have any ideas? Any help is greatly appreciated!