Using the 0.19 version, try the fix suggested by WMayer in his reply, Re: Black screen by starting first document. In particular, if you have admin access on your machine, I suggest the environmental variable fix he suggests in the last line of his post. That fix worked for the recent 0.19.17337 nightly, where as some previous recent nightlies didn't have this problem with the black screen in the viewport(work area).
I generally don't like to alter environmental settings, but for the sake of access to nightly FC releases with this issue, I made this one modification to the environmental settings on my machine.
Thanks,
Russ