J
Jon Sherry
I'm the local IT support person for a 45 workstation 2003 domain network
and I'm encountering a very unusual behavior on about half our workstations,
and to varying degrees of severity. For some reason, when users log in
they're greeted with their wallpaper, but the Explorer shell does not
launch.
-- You can do a Ctrl-Alt-Delete and run Explorer through the Task Manager
and everything loads normally.
-- Hard powering-down the computer and restarting it causes it to log in
normally, but the next day this behavior returns.
-- This only affects some users and not all, approximately half our users
see this behavior.
-- Some users affected see this once or twice a week, others every day, some
not at all.
-- No Event Log entries show up to indicate anything is wrong.
In trying to determine the cause of the issue I started looking at those
processes running at the time the Explorer shell fails to start. The one
process I did see consuming CPU time was the scanning agent for the EZAudit
software we use. This is run by a startup script once a week to compile
information on software loaded onto each computer. We disabled the EZAudit
scans to see if this rectified the problem, and not only didn't it fix the
issue, suspending it actually caused some computers to have the "no shell"
issue more often. My own workstation went from having this issue once a
week to having it daily after we stopped running the EZAudit scans.
All affected computers have been thoroughly scanned for viruses and
spyware using numerous tools, nothing has been discovered. An analysis of
all autoruns on affected computers yields no significant differences from
those that aren't. Viewing active processes shows only basic Windows
service processes and Symantec Anti-Virus resident protection running
My hope is that some bright MVP or fellow user might be able to
recommend something that can either walk the process startup list or find
out what is holding up the works. This is a most frustrating problem for my
users and myself, so I'd appreciate any tips or suggestions on where to look
for the cause of this problem.
Thanks in advance!
and I'm encountering a very unusual behavior on about half our workstations,
and to varying degrees of severity. For some reason, when users log in
they're greeted with their wallpaper, but the Explorer shell does not
launch.
-- You can do a Ctrl-Alt-Delete and run Explorer through the Task Manager
and everything loads normally.
-- Hard powering-down the computer and restarting it causes it to log in
normally, but the next day this behavior returns.
-- This only affects some users and not all, approximately half our users
see this behavior.
-- Some users affected see this once or twice a week, others every day, some
not at all.
-- No Event Log entries show up to indicate anything is wrong.
In trying to determine the cause of the issue I started looking at those
processes running at the time the Explorer shell fails to start. The one
process I did see consuming CPU time was the scanning agent for the EZAudit
software we use. This is run by a startup script once a week to compile
information on software loaded onto each computer. We disabled the EZAudit
scans to see if this rectified the problem, and not only didn't it fix the
issue, suspending it actually caused some computers to have the "no shell"
issue more often. My own workstation went from having this issue once a
week to having it daily after we stopped running the EZAudit scans.
All affected computers have been thoroughly scanned for viruses and
spyware using numerous tools, nothing has been discovered. An analysis of
all autoruns on affected computers yields no significant differences from
those that aren't. Viewing active processes shows only basic Windows
service processes and Symantec Anti-Virus resident protection running
My hope is that some bright MVP or fellow user might be able to
recommend something that can either walk the process startup list or find
out what is holding up the works. This is a most frustrating problem for my
users and myself, so I'd appreciate any tips or suggestions on where to look
for the cause of this problem.
Thanks in advance!
I've verified the