interactive logon process initialization has failed

[Guest]

A customer brought a pretty new Dell laptop w/Vista Home Premium into the
shop that is getting this error on bootup. Same error in Safe Mode & Last
Known Good Config. I tried taking the system repair option from the F8 boot
menu and did a system restore to the day before the problem occurred but get
the same error.

I then ran Startup Repair instead of system restore and Startup Repair did
not detect any problems.

Any ideas on how to fix this, short of a wipe and reinstall?

 

[Guest]

You should advise the customer to contact Dell for free support. However, I
found this off the wall suggestion in Help that might apply: Open Ease of
Access center in Control Panel and click on Change Administrative Settings
and uncheck Apply to all Logon.... Ease of access used to be called
Accessibility Options. It sounds like the user inadvertently started one of
those processes and I would go through them all to make sure.

 

[Guest]

They do not want to lose their data - the daughter is using this machine for
college course work and has not backed up recently.

Based on my past experience working with Dell tech support, they aren't
going to know how to solve this problem - they follow their script, which
eventually arrives at wipe & reinstall. Since it is a Dell, Microsoft won't
talk to us/them unless we pay them to help us fix their bug.

Your suggestion will not work unless you can logon to the system - the
problem I am reporting prevents that.

 

[Malke]

They do not want to lose their data - the daughter is using this machine for
college course work and has not backed up recently.

Based on my past experience working with Dell tech support, they aren't
going to know how to solve this problem - they follow their script, which
eventually arrives at wipe & reinstall. Since it is a Dell, Microsoft won't
talk to us/them unless we pay them to help us fix their bug.

Your suggestion will not work unless you can logon to the system - the
problem I am reporting prevents that.

I don't have the answer, but you should just back up the daughter's data
now. Either boot with Knoppix or a Bart's PE with an external usb drive
connected for target or pull the laptop drive and put it in an
enclosure/slave-adapter and use one of your working Windows machines.

Once the data is off and safely burned to CD/DVD-R, you can go forward
with either talking to Dell tech support or do a reinstall.


Malke

 

[Guest]

It's probably coming to that. In XP, a repair reinstall would fix this, but
there isn't that option in Vista (step backwards, in my opinion). This is my
first encounter with Windows Vista Cratered Edition, and I am suspecting it
won't be the last.

I did run chkdsk /r from the command prompt available in System Recovery
Options and it found and fixed a slew of errors. Still got the error, so am
running it a second time. I am betting that the hard drive doesn't have a
mechanical problem in its first few months of usage. If chkdsk doesn't fix
it, it is W&R time. Dell tech support is usually useless.

FWIW, the original problem was that she started getting SideBySide errors
whenever she tried to run an Office 2007 app, so she tried a reinstall of
Office 2007, worked with Dell tech support, and then the support techs at the
college got their hands on it and reportedly tried installing Office 2003!
While I could see that causing big problems (if it did not do the proper
checks and abort), I wouldn't expect it to kill the user logon process.
Indeed, she was able to logon to the machine up until this morning.