Passwords not recognized

[sylerner]

I am running a fully patched system with XP Pro SP2.

With increasing frequency, when I walk away from my machine and come
back later to the Welcome Screen, none of my passwords work.

Even accounts with no password will not log in - when I click on them,
instead of logging me in the password entry box appears - even though
the account has no password!

No amount of hitting shift, control or alt keys allows me to
successfully enter a password when this happens. My only choice is to
reboot the machine, at which point things are back to normal both for
password and non-password accounts.

Has anyone else had similar problems, and if so, did you find a fix?

Thanks,

Simcha-Yitzchak Lerner

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I am running a fully patched system with XP Pro SP2.

With increasing frequency, when I walk away from my machine and come
back later to the Welcome Screen, none of my passwords work.

Even accounts with no password will not log in - when I click on them,
instead of logging me in the password entry box appears - even though
the account has no password!

No amount of hitting shift, control or alt keys allows me to
successfully enter a password when this happens. My only choice is to
reboot the machine, at which point things are back to normal both for
password and non-password accounts.

Has anyone else had similar problems, and if so, did you find a fix?

Thanks,

Simcha-Yitzchak Lerner

This always happens when your keyboard is not what
you think it is. It might be in upper case, the NumLock
key might be on (a big trap with many laptops and cordless
keyboards!) or the keyboard could be in a different
language mode (a frequent problem with those using
several languages). The fact that the password works
after a reboot confirms that there is nothing wrong with
the password itself, only with your password entry.

 

[sylerner]

This always happens when your keyboard is not what
you think it is. It might be in upper case, the NumLock
key might be on (a big trap with many laptops and cordless
keyboards!) or the keyboard could be in a different
language mode (a frequent problem with those using
several languages). The fact that the password works
after a reboot confirms that there is nothing wrong with
the password itself, only with your password entry.

That's not the case here.

As mentioned in my original post, I already checked for this.

But more importantly, accounts that have /no/ password, which should
log in when clicked on in the Welcome Screen, instead were prompting
for passwords when clicked!

Something either messed up Windows so that it had incorrect password
information, or something was intentionally blocking all attempts of
logging in.

I had this happen on another machine, and it was happening so often
that I had to wipe it and reinstall (I tried several spyware scanning
programs with nothing detected).

I'm just wondering if anyone else has seen this, and if so if they know
how to fix it without wiping the entire machine.