I'm stuck!

[Ed P]

Time to take the steps Dave gave earlier:

“After that it’s boot from a W10 USB stick and try repair or set Safe Mode for booting. When the Windows boot screen appears power off the PC. Do this three times so that on the 4th Windows boots in Advanced Startup”

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Maybe an explination of how things SHOUD work would help.

Logon begins when the local session manager (Lsm.exe) runs for the first time and calls Winlogon.exe. Both Lsm and Winlogin are critical processes and the system will blue screen instantly if either stops running. Because Winlogin is critical you never get to actually see it, it calls LogonUI.exe as a child process and that presents you with the login box. The idea is if LogonUI crashes then Winlogin can restart it.

LogonUI handles the running of credential providers which by default are password or smartcard but developers can write their own.

Once a users details have been captured LogonUI will pass them to the local security authentication server process (LSASS.exe) and then close.

Once a users credentials have been verified LASS obtains an access token object that contains the users security profile. If you are an admin and UAC is enabled then a second restricted token is also generated and thats the one that gets used until you use ellivation.

The token is passed back to Winlogon which uses it to run Userinit.exe with the correct user details.

Userinit does some initialisation including running the logon script and then runs the user shell (usually explorer.exe) then it quits.

You will now see your desktop. Winlogon never quits and its always in the background waiting for someone to press CTL ALT DEL.

 

 

[Tippon]

Holy crap, I’ve fixed it! 😮

I put the screwed up drive to one side last year with the intention of coming back to it, but never got around to it. I’ve been feeling rough over the last few days, so thought I’d have another go as a distraction. I ran through everything in this thread and the saved links I had, to remind myself of what I’d already tried, then took to Google. In the middle of a page full of command line examples and registry edits, someone mentioned having the same problem because of a clash between their Nvidia and Intel graphics. They uninstalled the Nvidia card through Device Manager and it worked.

I thought there’s no harm in trying, so I uninstalled mine. I lost any sort of display for several reboots, then lost access to the command line and the programs that I got running through it. I managed to get the command line back, but when I tried to reinstall the Nvidia driver, it wouldn’t work, I just kept getting a generic error message. I wasn’t getting a mouse at this point, so I was running Windows setup from a USB drive, as it was starting the mouse driver. I was about to restore the backup to start again, so I thought I’d give Windows setup another try, even though it failed every other time (as I’m typing this, I’m realising what might have happened*).

Setup ran and asked me if I wanted to keep my files and settings. It got this far last time, but crashed not long afterwards, so I let it run. About an hour or so later, it had not only finished, but had updated Windows to 1903 too. Apart from everything being months out of date, and lots of my passwords needing to be updated, everything seems to be running properly. I’m tidying a few things up now before doing a backup.

I’m a bit annoyed that it turned out to be something relatively simple, especially when I’ve tried uninstalling drivers previously, but I’m quite chuffed that it’s fixed, even if it has taken so long 😀

* Part of getting the command line was editing the registry to basically trick Windows into thinking that setup was running. I’ve always just closed the command prompts or reset the computer. This time I typed exit to close the prompt, and I’m wondering if that told Windows that setup had finished, and previously it thought that it was still running. I’m wondering if that affected the Nvidia driver too, which is why it’s only shown the error now.

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