cmd.exe opens to a blank/black screen

Is your cmd.exe opening to a blank/black screen?    It works if you run-as administrator?  It works if you open PowerShell first, and then execute cmd.exe?     Yeah, that's where I have ended up on several various machines, including home and enterprise edition.     

In all my cases, the prompt is actually working as I tested it with .bat file and they ran, but screen still looks blank/black, implying hung process.  Nope, somehow the colors have gotten reset to black on black on black.   I certainly did not set these values on over a dozen different machines with the same problem.

Pick the top left of the blank/black cmd.exe screen, and select properties.  Then simply make sure your text, background, and are not all the same value.  In all my situations somehow Windows set them to RGB 0. 

I changed my background to a flavor of green for this quick fix, and now the problem is rather simply solved.

Apparently this was never really was an OS problem for my multiple machines, but I've seen dozens of forum posts from people all reverting to restores, and resets to fix when it was simply black-on-black text.   Still no idea why this has happened so many times, can't blame me on this one as my corporate enterprise Windows has had the same problem and I have no admin control of those systems to modify or install software.