User login hang ... Need Ideas

[William I. Bormann]

Greetings,

After chasing this problem for three days I thought I'd throw myself
at the mercy of this group and see if you have any ideas.

Problem: when I log into a user account on my Windows 2000
Professional box the system hangs when I try to launch a program on
the desktop. Whatever is happening is so severe I can't launch the
task manager; CTRL+ALT+DEL brings up the shutdown/logoff dialog, but
it doesn't actually shutdown or log off the account. The only way out
of this is to poke the reset button on the system.

Things that work: I can log into the Administrator account and work
normally there. In safe mode (with and without networking), I can log
into both the Administrator and user account and things work as
expected.

The last unusual thing I did on the system was to defragment the disk
drive.

The system is patched and up-to-date according to Windows Update.
I've also made certain that IE is up-to-date with all the latest
patches.

The login process for the user account seems to complete normally
until I try to do something (like start My Computer). Oddly, though,
doing this in safe mode things are ok.

Any ideas about how to debug this problem would be very useful.

Regards,

William I. Bormann
(e-mail address removed)

 

[David Adner]

It may be something loaded in the user's profile or Run key in the
Registry that's causing the system to go into a crippled state. If you
can't even load Task Manager to view running processes (and possibly
identify a process that's consuming 100% of the CPU, for example), then
something you might try is to delete the user's profile. If there's
info in the profile you want to save, do so (it's under C:\Documents and
Settings\<Username>). You can even copy the entire folder (while logged