Thursday, April 9, 2009

Computer immediately logs off

I had an XP computer that immediately logged off once the user logged onto the computer. I slaved the drive to my workshop computer and found that the userinit.exe was missing from c:\windows\system32. I copied the file over from c:\windows\system32\dllcache and the computer rebooted.

The fact that this file just disappeared was interesting. I think that what happened was that their anti-virus program zapped a bug while it was still installing itself. Reading further on, sometimes the problem can be a bad setting in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\userinit where the setting should be the same file c:\windows\system32\userinit.exe, . Note the comma.

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