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Windows xp logon and logoff screens

G

Gustavus

Golden Member
I can't show screenshots, but will try to describe the puzzle. My wife had a Dell running Windows XP with SP3 that always had a strange (to me) logon and log off sequence of screens. Instead of the full Welcome screen where a user name and a box to enter a password appears -- if a password is required, a small dark blue box -- maybe 2" by 4" appeared with two light boxes -- one containing her user name and the other prompting for her password to be entered. When she logged off, instead of the familiar (to me) logoff screen where you choose to shut down, restart etc. the same dark blue box appeared with a pull down menu in which you could choose the shutdown function. Weird, since I had never seen this sort of startup or shut down screens on any other machine, but I just chalked it up to the proprietary version Windows she had from Dell. I hated the Dell machine and wasn't too concerned since she was satisfied with it.

Her Dell began to act up so I gave her my main machine, and IC7G motherboard with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 which I had used for several hours a day for years. A real workhorse that had never given any trouble. It started up and shut down with the same Windows XP screens as all of my other machines. After a couple of days, it is showing the same strange logon and logoff screens her Dell showed -- but it can't be the Dell that is responsible -- the two machines are not even connected.

She of course says I didn't do anything. But it must be that there is a option she has selected on both her old Dell and the new machine I gave her since the only thing in common to the two machines is her.

Anyone know what the explanation for these strange startup and shut down screens is and what needs to be unchecked -- or checked -- to get back to the usual Windows XP screens?

Thanks for your help. You may save me the expense of a marriage counselor if you can tell me how to fix the problem.
 
postmortemIA

Thanks for the reply. While what you suggested didn't solve the problem directly, it led to me finding and fixing the problem.

When I opened Control Panel, there was no user options tab, but there was a user accounts tab -- nearest thing to the tab you suggested. I opened it and there was a tab to change the way users log off and on. Again sounded like the next best thing so opened it and found a tab that was unchecked for Use Welcome Screen. When I tried to check it, an error box popped up saying a recently added software had disabled the Welcome screen and that it would have to be removed before the Welcome screen could be enabled. It gave a lead to athgina.dll as the responsible software. A search on net found thousands of postings by people who had their welcome screen disabled by this. Most of those postings led nowhere, but way down in the list was a TechnoGeeks post that tracked it down to something called GINA that was installed with the Atheros wireless NIC software. They gave the registry entry causing the problem which I deleted and now everything is back to where it should be.

I was already in the process of replacing the Atheros (Hewlett Packard) wireless card for an entirely different reason. My wife likes to schedule recording an NPR news program while we are asleep and the link often cuts out on her so that in the morning nothing has been recorded. Running DCP latency checker shows that while her latency is normally 100 microseconds, every 60 seconds it jumps to over 1000 -- enough to cause the dropout. Uninstalling the Atheros card gets rid of the latency jump -- also turns out this problem has over 20,000 posts on net. The only solution appears to be to use a different wireless chipset -- so I had already ordered a wireless card to replace the Hewlett Packard one which uses the Atheros chipset.

Long winded way to say thank you for the lead that put me on the right track to solve the logon/logoff screen anomaly.
 
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glad it worked - I used my memory how it was on XP. I am running Windows 7 which has different User Accounts options, and different welcome screen.
 
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