EXPLORER.EXE not firing at login

[RichF]

Intermittently upon login, the users desktop does not appear. The users
have to CTRL-ALT-DEL, go in to Task Manager, and run EXPLORER.EXE to get
their desktop and icons to appear. Once they do that, they are fine. Any
suggestions? There's no errors in the eventlogs at or around the time they
logged in - not even any warnings.

All machines are Windows XP SP2 and have been patched with all the latest
updates.

Problem is very intermittent.

 

[Marcin Domaslawski]

Hi,

Check "Shell" entry into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon key.
It should have "Explorer.exe" value - if is - check if users have got at
least read permission to this key.

Marcin Domaslawski

 

[RichF]

Thanks Marcin, but we checked several of the machines that are affected by
this and this key is already set to Explorer.exe. Keep in mind, this
problem is extremely intermittent and we have yet to successfully reproduce
it consistently. Do you have any other things to check? Is there a way we
can log/debug the login process so we can get more detail and potentially
see what is going on?

Thx
Rich

 

[fxkeough]

Rich I have the same problem as you, but less intermittent.
I have found local accounts work, I suspect it has something to do
with GP's, but it only affects one
group of notebooks.
have you found and answer?

Thanks

Frank