Hi,

We have a few W2k PC's on our windows 2000 domain that when left at the login screen for a certain amount of time the PC becomes locked. It gives you the message that only an administrator can unlock this computer but when using the administrators login it still refuses to connect.

Only turning the PC off and on again will allow you to get back to the original login screen. I've tried reinstalling SP4 and installing all available patches. Also tried disjoing the and rejoining the domain with the same result.

I have come across something similar in technet which refers to the screen saver but no screensaver is selected.

Please help.....this seems to be happening to more and more PC's.

 

Cheers

Have you scanned any of the machines for viruses, ad/spyware?

Hi Morph....yeah mate...certainly have...was the first thing i did.

How long of a wait at the login screen does this become an issue?  I am not too familiar with domain settings, or W2K's group policies...so I am trying to think of something obvious that may be getting in your way.

it seems to grey out after about 20mins. I have ruled out Group Policies by moving the pc's effected to an OU with no linked Group Policies.

Any ideas Morph?

Been bangin my head on this for a bit now, never really used 2000 on a domain before....mostly stand alone server.  Trying to think of the old 95/98 days when the machines at work had issues with domain logins.

Refresh my memory, tell me what you see in the Users section of the Control Panel, there's got to be a way to change the way users log in and out...maybe something there was changed.

On the off chance could you sheck to see if the NIC is set to power down to conserve power.  Should be on Device Manager.

This option appears in the Advanced Settings of the Network Adapter, in the last pane, called " Power Management " .

Check that as well as any Spyware, or Malware.

Keep Up !

From your description of the computer locking after some period of time, either the user configured a password protected screen saver, or this is being pushed to the computers via GPO.

As far as the computer isn't allowing the admin logons to unlock it, you didn't mention if the same admin logon will work once you're at the logon screen after booting.   It is entirely possible that these computers are not communicating with the DCs, so that admin logon (especially the one to unlock the workstation) aren't being authenticated by a DC.   The first thing I'd check would be name resolution to be sure you're finding the DCs properly (pointing to the same DNS servers as the DCs), also try running netdiag.exe with the "/v" switch to report errors.   It could be that the logons from the C-A-D screen (Ctrl-Alt-Del) are occurring via cached credentials (so try creating a new user in the domain, then try to logon to this box, if it can't, you're not seeing the domain).