Blank blue screen after log-in

Here’s how I fixed the blank blue screen problem on a brand new Dell Inspiron 3847 desktop with Windows 8.1 x64 OS.  When Windows loaded, sometimes it worked fine and sometimes I got a blank blue screen with just a cursor showing.  Seemed like that happened most often after a restart or waking up from hibernation.  When I had just a blank blue screen with a cursor, I noticed there was still a Windows button in the lower left corner that would show up when my cursor came over it.  (This may not be the case for those who use a password to log in and go thru the lock screen.)  When I clicked on the Windows button, it would take me to a normal looking Start screen.  From there I could go to the desktop where there were taskbar icons showing on the bottom left but no shortcuts showing on the desktop and no tray icons on the bottom right.  If I clicked on any of the taskbar programs, the icon became highlighted and a small image of the open program would show if I pointed to the icon, but nothing had opened on the screen.  It was like things were happening somewhere, but not on the screen I was looking at.

After much starting, restarting, and finding no definite solution on the internet, I had an idea.  I went back to the Start screen, opened the charms bar, clicked on the Settings charm, clicked on “Change PC settings”, clicked on “PC and devices”, and then clicked on “Display”.  In the “Multiple displays” option box, the default setting was “Extend these displays”.  I changed this to be “Show only on 1”.  And voila!  Going back to the desktop I could now see those programs that were open.  And there was no more blank screen after starting up!  I guess when I was looking at a blank blue screen or a desktop that didn’t seem to work, I was actually looking at screen #2 of some sort of two-screen configuration.  It wouldn’t happen every time, but it happened often enough to be a real nuisance.  What seemed like a bad driver or a conflict in startup processes turned out to be just an improper default setting for the display.  Amazing!  Hope this fix will help you or someone else out there.