Attn Malke: have tried several of your diagnostic suggestions - further observation

[Doghouse Riley]

This is regarding the machine that logs out to the welcome screen at
random intervals... have tried 1-3 of your list so far with nothing
found.

The computer -never- actually locks up in any way. As a matter of
fact, this afternoon my wife was running a long print job. The PC
dropped out to the welcome screen and she logged back in. The print
spooler continued to run without a hitch. Last night I was logged
into this machine using PC Anywhere. In mid session, it dropped me
out to the welcome screen, which I could see over the network
connection. I was able to log back in on remotely and get back to
work.

It's just hard to imagine any sort of hardware crash working that way.








1) Open the computer and run it open, cleaning out all dust bunnies
and observing all fans (overheating will cause system freezing).
2) Test the RAM - I like Memtest86+
3) Test the hard drive with a diagnostic utility
4) The power supply may be going bad or be inadequate for the devices
you have in the system - this isn't applicable to a laptop, of course.
5) Test the motherboard with something like TuffTest from
www.tufftest.com.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Control Panel, Power Options has a Advanced tab setting to 'require a password...'

 

[Tim_]

Control Panel, Power Options has a Advanced tab setting to 'require a
password...'

I ran pcAnywhere on XP Home and it behaved the same way, and then it ate my
control registry. The dialog box warned me of a file in \system, but I
don't remember what it was called (aw????something). The dialog told be
that pcAnywhere had changed the default log-in screen to the more
restrictive log-in screen.

Reboot. Re-install. Sigh.

 

[Doghouse Riley]

Control Panel, Power Options has a Advanced tab setting to 'require a password...'

Thanks for chiming in, but I'm not sure you picked up on the exact
problem. What I have is a WinXP system that several times a day, at
random intervals unconnected with anything I can determine, decides to
close out the desktop and go back to the "welcome" screen. (It gives
me an unhelpful dw.exe dll message first ("The application failed to
initialize because the windows station was shutting
down." - thanks a lot).

Malke's reply to my original message was very matter of fact about it
being a hardware failure and nothing else. I have done several
hardware diagnostics and found no problems yet.

The system never locks up when this happens, we can always log back in
without ever having to touch a reset button or power switch..
Keyboard and mouse remain functional. Spooled print jobs continue to
run uninterruptedly throughout the whole process: random log-out,
welcome screen, log back in. As I said, the other day while I was
logged into this machine remotely via PC Anywhere, I saw the whole
thing happening via the remote screen - not only did the "hardware
crash" not lock the system, it stayed on line with the ISP and
maintained the PC Anywhere connection all through the
logout-welcome-log back in.

We've run a complete virus check with the latest Norton signatures and
a full pass with Spybot 1.3 - no problems found. The system runs
behind a ZoneAlarm firewall and we use Opera and Eudora instead of
Outlook and Explorer so I am reasonably comfortable that it's not
malware.

The symptoms as described above just make me more and more doubtful
that this is hardware connected.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

If you don't want to try unchecking the option, it's fine by me. I was suggesting a way to detect what was going on.