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Winlogon suddenly asks for non-existing password


Guillaume

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this is good information. I am not convinced however, that it is Winlogon doing funny things, I suspect the ATI driver might be the culprit, see my posts (especially the last one) under this thread: http://www.msfn.org/board/Strange-issue-wi...gon-t81944.html

ATI hotkey poller seems to mess up with the logon process. This could be at least part of the explanation.

Edited by coch
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I don't think it's the ATi service, since that one is either disabled or removed in the systems affected. Thus, what remains might be a problem in the way Winlogon handles the fact that it should send logon/logoff etc. messages to a service that isn't available.

I think nuhi had the same problem with an nVidia card, but he is obviously smart enough to have the nVidia service(s) disabled as well... ;) Don't know whether nVidia puts a link to its service in the Winlogon key mentioned earlier, though.

Maybe someone could disable as many services as possible that are listed under that key, such as Secondary Logon, Cryptographic Services etc. Maybe this'll cause the same problems, otherwise, it's merely the way the ATi service uses this key.

Edited by Guillaume
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I think you may perhaps have completely forgotten the IE settings programs running on each login.

They are hidden. I have removed mine so cant find out what name is atm. There's 2 IE startup programs running on each boot/login. Which sets settings for IE apparently but could be many things. Use tool as Jv16 to remove them.

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I don't get what you mean, could you please be more specific?

Under the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify, the following keys are present. I don't think many of them are actually necessary and heard decreasing the number of the entries here could really improve logon/logoff speed:

crypt32chain

cryptnet

cscdll

dimsntfy

Schedule

sclgntfy

SensLogn

termsrv

wlballoon

nLite also enables you to remove the component "Logon Notifications", which - I think - would completely remove the problem. Nuhi, am I correct if I state that this component is involved the process described above?

I just found out that I still DO have a problem with the cursor not showing up in the password dialog, but pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL twice always worked. This supposedly has more to do with some kind of problem in the Common Controls v6 library (latest version of comctl32.dll in Windows\WinSxS).

Edited by Guillaume
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I was thinking of IEudinit.exe and Ie4unit.exe which are launched on logins etc. Safe to remove for single user system.

Ie Per user initialization and per active setup programs. Has nothing to do with login notifications afaik, not that that was what you meant.

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I don't think it's the ATi service, since that one is either disabled or removed in the systems affected.

Yeah maybe I confused things and was not too clear in my previous post by saying that the ATI Hotkey Poller service messes up with winlogon. Actually, what I am seeing, and I can reproduce this, is that the issue arises when the ATI Hotkey Poller is disabled. Thus, if you have an ATI card and driver installed and disabled the ATI Hotkey Poller service this might be the cause. At least for me this was the explanation although it may have been something specific to my system as well.

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I have two users configured, both with admin rights. One is the backup admin login, the second is the default user login ID. The backup admin has a password set, while the default user password is blanked out. Both were set to never expire using nlite.

However, after the image is loaded, a check of the user properties shows the backup admin password is indeed set to never expire, but not the default user ID that had the blanked out password even though both were set to never expire.

I'm thinking that if you set a blank password in nlite, setting the password to never expire doesn't work for some reason, maybe because there isn't a real password. I will experiment with this using real passwords in both next time to see if it makes any difference.

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I wasn't referring to the IE stuff being related to the logon notifications, no. But do you have any proof/earlier speculations of these programs being part of the problem?

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I don't think it's the ATi service, since that one is either disabled or removed in the systems affected.

Yeah maybe I confused things and was not too clear in my previous post by saying that the ATI Hotkey Poller service messes up with winlogon. Actually, what I am seeing, and I can reproduce this, is that the issue arises when the ATI Hotkey Poller is disabled. Thus, if you have an ATI card and driver installed and disabled the ATI Hotkey Poller service this might be the cause. At least for me this was the explanation although it may have been something specific to my system as well.

Ok, I think you understand what I mean, but just to be sure: as the ATi Hotkey Poller service is disabled, it can't do anything that causes a problem, right? So it's the process that tries to communicate with the ATi service that causes the problems, which is... Logon Notifications. This gets confirmed by deleting the registry key I mentioned, which instructs the Notifications process to communicate a logon/logoff instruction to the ATi service, which it can't reach when disabled, causing really strange problems in the Welcome dialog.

I'm thinking that if you set a blank password in nlite, setting the password to never expire doesn't work for some reason, maybe because there isn't a real password. I will experiment with this using real passwords in both next time to see if it makes any difference.

Yep, I came across this problem once or twice, too. I just checked and you're right: I did enable the 'never expires' option for all my accounts, but only the one with a pass actually got this property after installation.

Edited by Guillaume
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