can't unlock workstation

[Rodney Demko]

We have a user who shut off their laptop on Friday and
when he started it up again this morning, it came up in
the "This workstation is locked... Enter ctrl-alt-delete
to unlock..." but when the user enters ctrl-alt-delete,
nothing happens at all, it just stays on the current
locked window. The user did a cold shut down and started
the laptop back up again and got the same window. He even
removed the battery thinking it would reset everything and
let him do a normal login. No such luck. I searched the
knowledge bas and found nothing that exactly matches this
issue. Everything I found said to enter ctrl-alt-delete or
shutdown and restart. Neither of these worked for us.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Ping the workstation via the network to determine if it is
still alive. If yes, use psexec.exe (free from www.sysinternals.com)
to start a remote session and check what processes are
running.

 

[Rodney Demko]

We can't ping his machine as he is in Denver and not
connected to our network. He is in the Sales dept. and is
rarely here. I can't actually lay my hands on his machine
either. Is there something that is easy for the average
end user to try that I might suggest to him?

 

[Consultant]

while it is booting, hit f8 and choose last known good configuration

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Your original post is a little puzzling. I can understand that the
machine may have seized up when the screen saver cuts in.
However, after a cold boot, the machine is supposed to go
through a proper reboot process, with a logon prompt. The
message "This machine is locked" cannot occur until much
later.

Regardless of this: Ask you user to repeatedly press the
CapsLock key when the machine is locked. If the CapsLock
light does not go off and on then this suggests that Windows
no longer scans the keyboard. This in turn suggests that the
screen saver is corrupt. Tell your user to turn off the screen
saver, and to scan the machine for viruses, using the latest
pattern files.