Black screen problems with Windows 10 at login

[lmrogers]

I put those Impero exclusions in yesterday and have already had a report of a black screen this morning.

[alfatec]

Hey Timbo, Are you sure it was not after you disabled the 'Telemetry service' as our logon speed was significantly better in that the desktop and icons showed straight away and users could use the desktop instantly instead of a short delay after we disable it.

[steven_layton_sl]

Imrogers - Its possible you might have a second unrelated issue. Prior to discovering the link between Impero and the black screen issues, we found that we needed to introduce a logoff script to correct a bloat issue with the Windows 10 Start Menu cache. When we introduced this, our instances dropped about 80%. I'm hoping that the Impero fixes cure the remaining 20%!

 

Let me know if you want more info.

[Ephelyon]

@steven_layton_sl - have I missed this earlier?

[steven_layton_sl]

I have this script as a logoff script, which tidies the Start Menu cache on logoff.

 

On Error Resume Next

Dim objShell,strKeyPath

strKeyPath = "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UFH\SHC"

Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject ("WScript.shell")

objShell.RegDelete (strKeyPath)

[Ephelyon]

Right okay, thanks for that.

 

By the way, you can do that more simply as a batch file rather than as a VB script:

 

reg delete HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UFH\SHC /f

[timbo343]

Hey Timbo, Are you sure it was not after you disabled the 'Telemetry service' as our logon speed was significantly better in that the desktop and icons showed straight away and users could use the desktop instantly instead of a short delay after we disable it.

 

It could be. Ive made so many changes to solve this that im not sure which settings have made the log on process quicker.

[steven_layton_sl]

How odd. A member of staff got the black screen issue today. On checking, the Injection Exception rule for UserInit.exe was not listed, but I am very sure I did add it last week. I have now re-added that and will monitor again. Odd.

[timbo343]

Those who are getting the black screens and have impero, can i ask you to do a search in the log viewer over a few weeks (say from the start of november to today) and search on the following:

 

Search in: Windows Captions

search for: wscript.exe - Application Error

 

That's all that's needed.

 

We are seeing a fair few errors like wscript.exe - application error and unregmp2.exe - Application Error and ie4uinit.exe - Application Error. We think this causes the start menu button not to work.

 

Again, its only on random machines at random times.

[alfatec]

I think the Impero errors are a bit of a white elephant. We had 2 Staff laptops that had black screens today that do not have Impero on them. Also weirdly enough we have 80 Mac Mini's with Windows 10 in Bootcamp and have not had a single black screen.

The plot thickens.

[timbo343]

These aren't impero errors that im looking at, these are Application Errors, it's only impero that has logged them as impero does windows caption logging.

[alfatec]

OK slighty mis-read it. Will take a look. What start menu errors are you getting as we are not affected by any start menu errors for staff or students.

[timbo343]

The only start menu errors we seem to be getting are:

 

1. User doesn't get a clickable start button

2. My tech has just seen me and said a teacher has just had to have her roaming profile re-made as logged her off whilst it was logging on. He same back to look at what happened and impero gave the wscript.exe error.

[friendlytechnician]

Just for information, we've been hit with this problem now. Post - login. It started occuring when we upgraded Impero from version 5420 to 5436. At the same time, I noticed that Impero Server was not pushing updates to client machines so I also ticked this on. Our users also have a roaming profile.

Turning Impero off solves the problem.

 

In the first instance I'm going to restart the Impero service add userinit and explorer as expalined by timbo to list of exceptions and see what that does.

Then I'll try using the remove cache dump script posted by Steve if that doesn't work and will report back.

[steven_layton_sl]

Dumb question, but what is the path to the explorer.exe?

 

C:\Windows\WinSxS\wow64_microsoft-windows-explorer_31bf3856ad364e35_10.0.10586.104_none_c93f49bc0d024ed2

[Ephelyon]

You should just be able to enter the filename.

[stgoodyeara]

@steven_layton_sl the injection rules dont fix the black screens for me either.

 

Ive uninstalled impero off my network now. It just hopeless. They had the cheek to phone me up yesterday asking if i wanted to but back into the support. LOL

[Ephelyon]

Might want to redact that Activation Code there...

 

To be honest, I don't think Impero is the actual cause of this issue - I think it's a Microsoft bug that goes right back to Windows 8. I do think, though, that a number of different interactions could be exacerbating the problem, so eliminating factors like DLL hooks ought to reduce the instance of the problem, but probably won't actually eliminate it on their own. I think that's what this thread is evidencing.

 

It's as though the shell tries to load, fails and then gives up, which ought to be a very simple programmatic fix along the lines of "continually retry"... and that's why this bug is so very frustrating! It should be child's play to have userinit.exe check if the shell is running after X seconds and relaunch the process again if it's not... :/

Edited November 30, 2016 by Ephelyon

[timbo343]

Thanks for the mention on the live stream at the ANME conference . Disappointed i couldnt be there in person.

[timbo343]

I dont want to tempt fate but we've not had a black screen at login for a while.

 

Ive been slowly adding expections to the expection list, so now ive got:

userinit.exe

explorer.exe

wscript.exe

unregmp2.exe

fsquirt.exe

RAVCpl64.exe

[AliG]

The other day I got a cmd application error followed by the black screen

[timbo343]

The other day I got a cmd application error followed by the black screen

 

I had some of them but not seeing them now.

 

Impero log viewer has been a great help to see what the machines were hanging on and then i added that exe as an exception.

[AliG]

The other day I got a cmd application error followed by the black screen

[samb56]

Hi All, We are also having the black screen problems. We have added the exclusions and now received the CMD error. Has anyone anymore ideas?

[Ephelyon]

@Mic_Impero

 

It seems there's definitely something up with the way Impero interfaces with WinLogon. I've been having to reboot our new 2016 RDS host a lot lately, because after a while people just get a black screen when attempting to log on through RDP (this is before the user profile and etc is loaded though). I've attached a stack of events we get logged whenever it happens.

WinLogon.zip