XP PRO immediate logoff occurs before desktop is displayed

[Skipton]

Hi,
I have a laptop running Win XP PRO, it is a standalone machine with
only dialup networking to the Internet. The machine startup has
no error messages that I can see. An immediate loggoff occurs when you
try to login. Here is what happens:

1. "Logon to Windows" dialog box appears, you enter username
"Administrator" (there is no password on this machine).

2. Message in "Pleas wait..." dialog box "loading your personal
settings" appears and background colour changes.

3. Within a second before any desktop and icons appear the message in
"Pleas wait..." dialog box changes to "logging off...".

4. Message in "Please wait..." dialog box changes to "saving your
settings" (I only see this message on first attempt after re-booting).

5. After 4-8 seconds it is back to Logon to Windows" dialog box
appears.

The same behaviour occurs for usernames "default", "mark" and leaving
the username blank. In all cases the is no password for the username
(did try one and got the wrong password error message). I have gone
through all the options from advanced boot options menu (ie. "F8" on
boot up) and the same thing happens for username "Administrator". In
other words I can't even get into the machine in SAFE MODE (arrrgh!).


I was not able to boot directly from the XP PRO CD although an old
WIN98 boot CD does work but the volume is NTFS so that is no good :-(

I did boot from XP boot floppies (6 disk set) and bring up the Windows
Recover Console and logged in as "administrator" with no difficulty.
After doing a XP boot with logging I looked at the NTBTLOG.TXT from
Windows Recover Console prompt - I could not see anything that I
thought would help.

I have access to the CD drive in recovery console.

I have checked AUTOEXEC.BAT in case it was encrypted (as per a a
report on BugTraq that can cause a similar behaviour - Is there
anything I can check?

Does anyone have a suggestion on what to do next?

All I can think of is to reinstall from the XP boot floppy setup :-(

Thanks in advance,
Skipton
Perth, Australia
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[Melvin Ho]

Hi, just some suggestions..
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307545
How to Recover from a Corrupted Registry That Prevents Windows XP from
Starting
or
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341
How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade (Reinstallation) of Windows XP

Good Luck!

 

[Skipton]

Thanks - I tried recovering from the "repair" folder containing registry
files from initial install.

Result:
The problem remained as described earlier - immediate logoff occurred.

Q1:
Does anyone know if username/password info is part of registry?

After this change I was worse off because the recovered registry password
for administrator was different - and I don't know it! so I was unable to
access the recovery console to reverse the change - I wish I had known
that. To get back I ran setup from the CD and selected the "repair current
installation" option this resulted in no improvement to the problem - an
immediate logoff still occurs when I try to logon. I can get back in to
recovery console now that setup asked me to set the password. The dates of
items in the "repair" folder are now different so I assume setup has
rebuilt them.

Q2:Anyone know if this is right?

Q3:Anyone got a new idea?

Hi, just some suggestions..
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307545
How to Recover from a Corrupted Registry That Prevents Windows XP from
Starting
or
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341
How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade (Reinstallation) of Windows XP

Good Luck!

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