Login Randomly Rejects Passwords/assigns Password to non-password

[Guest]

After a period of inactivity Windows XP Professional goes to the login page.
Occasionally it will not accept the password to login to "passworded
acccount" and asks for a password for non-passworded accounts. I have to
restart the computer to login again. The computer is 1 year old and this has
happened three or four times in the last few months. It is a nuisance now,
but I fear it will get worse. Any ideas?

 

[Guest]

Short Term solution would be to disable the "On resume, password protect"
option in the screen Tab in Display Properties as i imagine its that which is
causing the PC to lock after a set period of inactivity.

Another suggestion may be to go into User Accounts in the Control Panel and
apply and then remove passwords to the accounts with no passwords, and
reapply the passwords to the password protected accounts.

Also, does this problem happen everytime the PC locks, or just occationally,
and does it still happen if you manually lock the PC (Press Start/Windows Key
+ L) as well as from the auto-lock.

 

[Guest]

Thank you for the quick response.
It happens occasionally. The only common circumstance that I see as a clue
is that all three of our accounts are logged in and we have simply "switched"
accounts without logging out. Only one of the accounts has a password, yet
when this happens Windows asks for a password for any of the accounts, but
won't accept the correct password for the one account that needs it.

I have not used the manual lock.

 

[Elmo]

Thank you for the quick response.
It happens occasionally. The only common circumstance that I see as a clue
is that all three of our accounts are logged in and we have simply "switched"
accounts without logging out. Only one of the accounts has a password, yet
when this happens Windows asks for a password for any of the accounts, but
won't accept the correct password for the one account that needs it.

I have not used the manual lock.

This might apply:

http://exodusdev.com/tech-tips/windows-xp-pro-login-problems