Everything's gone from my desktop!

I'm running into a massive issue here. Everything has completely vanished from my desktop
even the desktop itself is gone
plus all the icons in my Start menu have turned plain white

Moving data is impossible too—I tried with some photos but it just won't work
The error message looks like this:

Could anyone help me out? Has anyone dealt with something this broken before? 🙄

You’re running an AMD card, right?

Exactly

Some process called mom.exe from the Catalyst driver keeps acting up. Why? Who knows. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, you either have to reinstall Catalyst or just kill the damn thing in Task Manager.

If you decide to reinstall Catalyst, make sure you uninstall the old version first, otherwise things will get messy.

http://www.file.net/process/mom.exe.html
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

No surprises there, fellow moderator. We all know Catalyst was never exactly the gold standard for stability. 😬 Yeah, you’ll need to wipe the old Catalyst driver completely before installing the new one, and that should do the trick.

The mom.exe process wasn't even showing up in the Task Manager
but ever since I uninstalled Catalyst
I haven't been able to get the new AMD drivers installed

Try deleting the graphics driver via Device Manager, then run a fresh install of AMD Catalyst.

Or, if you want to be extra safe, just pull the installer, boot up into Safe Mode, and run it from there. Should do the trick. Then just reboot back to normal...

To be honest, I’m not much of a PC expert, so if anyone could walk me through this in more detail, I could really use the help.

rowdybadger18 said:Try going into the Device Manager, deleting the graphics driver, and then installing AMD Catalyst.

Could you explain how I actually go about doing that?

William Richardson12 said:Or, even better, just download the installer and restart your computer in Safe Mode to run it there. That should do the trick. Then just restart again to boot back up normally.

I looked around for the installer, but most things seem to just be small setup files that trigger further downloads. Can someone provide a direct link to what I need?

Look, just go into Device Manager, find that display adapter, right-click it, and hit uninstall. Then just reboot the machine and install the fresh driver...

I followed your instructions to a T
But I'm still stuck. Nothing has changed, and everything looks exactly the same as before 🤦

It’s not a driver issue. Just hit Start, type in Disk Cleanup, and run it. Clean out EVERYTHING it offers you. Then reboot the PC and let me know if it's still acting up...

Yeah, nothing has changed

So you had it looking like this in the pic


Check if that option shows up in Disk Cleanup. If it’s not there, we'll just do it manually...

What if they’re just total scammers?

You could even just give him exactly what he's looking for...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/down....aspx?id=30653

darkowl72 said:What if it's just some lowlifes?

Could be, but it should still do something... Might run an MBAM scan later and see what's actually going on.🤷

Here’s how you do it:

And mine looked just like this:

Should be fine. If it hasn't fixed itself by now, just yank whatever's there and run a scan with Malwarebytes... might catch something.

I just tried running a scan with Malwarebytes, but unfortunately, nothing changed. 🙂 Thanks so much for all the help so far, but does anyone have any other ideas on what might be going on? Any potential fixes? It feels like this thing has really taken a firm hold on my system. 🙄

darkowl72 said:You might as well just give him exactly what he's asking for at this point...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/down....aspx?id=30653

Just install the .NET Framework. If that doesn't fix it, you're looking at a full reinstall of macOS as far as I can tell...

I doubt even a System Restore would save you here...