Black Screen after Domain Login

[AJWhite1970]

Hi all

 

I've rolled out Win7 to 400 PC's over the summer and all is well except for a very random issue where a domain user will login and get the dreaded black desktop with only the start button visible. CTRL, ALT, DEL, logout and login again fixes it. I see about 10 instances of this a day cross campus and there is nothing in any of the logs. Have installed a ton of hotfixes etc but to no avail.

 

Not using the user folder redirection section in a GPO, but instead using redirection through the usershellfolders registry keys and although the shared desktop is on a network server it also happens on a couple of logins that run the desktop from c: with no other redirection.

 

Any other ideas? If I get this fixed then maybe just maybe I can finally have a day off

 

Cheers

Andrew

[Michael]

I've seen similar with workstations which have Intel graphics. Update the driver (through Windows Update) and it should fix the issue.

[ricki]

HI

 

Check as well the screen resolution is not too high for the card and the monitor.

 

Richard

[maark]

I have usually found it is connected to roaming profiles - try deleting local cached profile and perhaps giving the user a new profile in AD - sometimes go into registry if local profile messed up to delete it.

[AJWhite1970]

I've seen similar with workstations which have Intel graphics. Update the driver (through Windows Update) and it should fix the issue.

 

Actually now you mention it, I didn't think about graphics card drivers. A quick check reveals the PC's are on 2009 drivers so I'll be testing the latest drivers for Intel, ATI and NVidia to see if it makes a difference.

 

Thanks for the heads-up

Andrew

[Kenny_G]

Are you running Solus 3?

 

We are having a similar issue with the agent giving a black screen after login.

[AJWhite1970]

Are you running Solus 3?

 

We are having a similar issue with the agent giving a black screen after login.

 

Hi Kenny_G

 

Nope, no Solus here. Very early initial testing shows there is some mileage in the outdated graphics driver theory. I'll post back when I've run some more tests over the coming days.

 

Andrew

[CampionRobG]

We have the same issue, but on staff laptops. went to use a laptop I know had the black screen after log on and found the school desktop, the only difference i could tell had happened to the laptop form deployment was that all of the windows updates had been installed.

[liamvaughan]

Hi all

 

I've rolled out Win7 to 400 PC's over the summer and all is well except for a very random issue where a domain user will login and get the dreaded black desktop with only the start button visible. CTRL, ALT, DEL, logout and login again fixes it. I see about 10 instances of this a day cross campus and there is nothing in any of the logs. Have installed a ton of hotfixes etc but to no avail.

 

Not using the user folder redirection section in a GPO, but instead using redirection through the usershellfolders registry keys and although the shared desktop is on a network server it also happens on a couple of logins that run the desktop from c: with no other redirection.

 

Any other ideas? If I get this fixed then maybe just maybe I can finally have a day off

 

Cheers

Andrew

 

Hi,

 

When we have had the black screen on our Win7 machines there has been a couple of problems with a couple of settings in our old GPO's

 

The first one we found was "run scripts synchronously"

another was something along the lines of do not allow user to login until network is ready

also another issue we had was we didn't have startup in our all programs menu

and then finally there was an issue about offline files which once a user logged in they got the default icon to solve this we had to change a few settings on offline files.

 

Hope this helps

[AJWhite1970]

Just as an update - It's not related to graphics drivers as one of my test PC's with the latest Intel drivers on it black screened this morning. Now starting to trawl through old GPO's and try and find a rogue setting in there (but I would have thought a wrong GPO would cause far more PC's to blank than the occasional random one)

 

Days like this I wish I wasn't allergic to caffeine...

 

Andrew

[Michael]

The only other possibility - I remember sometime back there were reports of users (around the world) logging on and getting black screens. In the end, it was malware creating the problem.

[CampionRobG]

I have just been working on one of my problem black screen win 7 laptops, I have just installed sp1 and the school back ground has now been set as the background.

[stevenlong1985]

Is this the same issue caused by Sophos,

 

From Wednesday 19th/09/2012 I just had the one computer, Now I get the black screens happening across whole the school

 

Advisory: Shh/Updater-B False positives

[AJWhite1970]

Is this the same issue caused by Sophos,

 

From Wednesday 19th/09/2012 I just had the one computer, Now I get the black screens happening across whole the school

 

Advisory: Shh/Updater-B False positives

 

Hi

 

No thankfully we missed out on that one, my PC's mostly shutdown at 10pm (after evening classes) and our scheduled scans don't happen until 5am (after the backups have finished) so by then Sophos had already pushed out the correct IDE's. As evening classes don't start until this Monday, hardly any PC's were on or being used when the bad IDE went live and fortunately not a single PC self destructed...

 

Still trawling through GPO settings at the moment, have made a few tweaks and am now monitoring the situation. If I find the cure, I'll post it here.

 

Andrew

[AJWhite1970]

Hi

 

Still trying to track this down, made a lot of progress by repairing the libraries back to defaults (I had tried several reg hacks to remove them in the original build) and now folder redirection errors I thought were cosmetic have disappeared.

 

Just wondering if someone could confirm that this version of explorer.exe is the very latest available for Win7 SP1 32bit as I can't believe it's not been patched/hotfix'd somewhere for 18 months given just about every other Windows file has been updated since:-

 

File version: 6.1.7601.17567

Date modified: 25/02/2011 05:30

 

Many thanks

Andrew

[stevenlong1985]

what i've done is remove Policy central, sophos and deleted the profile. That seem to have worked

[AJWhite1970]

Hi

 

For anyone following this thread I finally found the solution and it turns out I'd missed an important hotfix during the build process...

 

The logon process stops responding in Windows Server 2008 R2 or in Windows 7

 

This was exactly what was happening and a roll-out of the hotfix has thus far resolved the random login black screen.

 

Onwards and upwards

Andrew

[Michael]

Glad you got this sorted

[plexer]

Hi

 

For anyone following this thread I finally found the solution and it turns out I'd missed an important hotfix during the build process...

 

The logon process stops responding in Windows Server 2008 R2 or in Windows 7

 

This was exactly what was happening and a roll-out of the hotfix has thus far resolved the random login black screen.

 

Onwards and upwards

Andrew

 

We've seen this with logins on multipoint server so I'm hoping it will appl to them as well should do as it's based on server 2008 r2.

 

What did you use to deploy this?

 

Ben

[AJWhite1970]

Hi Ben

 

I have a long batch file that installs over 70 hotfixes in this format:-

 

wusa.exe "R:\_July 2012 Windows 7\7Hotfix\wmi\Windows6.1-KB2578159-x86.msu" /quiet /norestart

 

I followed this article and have a login job scheduled to a particular user (patches) that runs the script with elevated rights

 

Elevated Program Shortcut without UAC Prompt - Create - Windows 7 Forums

 

The final line of the batch file reboots the PC

 

shutdown /f /r

 

It's a bit of a fudge but it works. I use AB Tutor control so it's easy to mass login rooms and fire the script through user GPO.

 

Andrew

[AJWhite1970]

 

Just wondering if someone could confirm that this version of explorer.exe is the very latest available for Win7 SP1 32bit as I can't believe it's not been patched/hotfix'd somewhere for 18 months given just about every other Windows file has been updated since:-

 

File version: 6.1.7601.17567

Date modified: 25/02/2011 05:30

 

To answer my own question in-case anyone else ever needs to know, the latest version of explorer.exe is:-

 

File version: 6.1.7601.22083

Date modified: 10/08/2012

 

and can be found here

Non-topmost window appears above a topmost window when you click the Show Desktop button on a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2

 

Andrew