Your Screen Saver Only Displays a Black Screen

When you configure your computer to use a screen saver that rotates multiple images, and then leave your computer idle for an appropriate amount of time, your screen saver may only display a black screen.

This issue can occur if the registry entry for the screen saver's media folder is missing or damaged.

WARNING: Using Registry Editor incorrectly can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

For information about how to edit the registry, view the "Changing Keys And Values" Help topic in Registry Editor (Regedit.exe) or the "Add and Delete Information in the Registry" and "Edit Registry Data" Help topics in Regedt32.exe. Note that you should back up the registry before you edit it. If you are running Windows NT, you should also update your Emergency Repair Disk (ERD).

To resolve this issue, navigate to the following key in the registry where <screensavername> is the name of your screen saver.

Create a new string value called "MediaDirectory" (without quotation marks), and then modify its value data to equal the path to the image files used by the screen saver. For example, to use the Horror theme, the value data would be: NOTE: You must type the backslash character (\) at the end of the path.