RE: logonui hung, no explorer.exe, no desktop icons

From: larry (larry_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 10/30/04 

Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 06:58:02 -0700

If you have safe mode command prompt, I would run chkdsk.exe. It may ask you
to reboot if windows files are in use. If necessary just power off. Chkdsk
will run before your user logon welcome. This may clean up minor corruption.

"TonyG" wrote:

> I see people in forums everywhere posting on this, but no resolutions.
> Let's find out what this is!
>
> Symptoms
> My XP SP1 with full patches was working fine. I booted this morning
> and saw a warning that there was an invalid registry key, but that a
> prior version of the registry was available and it was going to use
> that. I had to OK it. Then nothing.
>
> I hard reset. I have auto-login to a user in group admin. I see the
> desktop wallpaper, hear the music, then it goes back to windows logon
> and stays there. The only thing active is ctrl-alt-delete which brings
> up task manager. The desktop under that shows wallpaper with no icons.
> logonui.exe is running and a few other services, explorer.exe is not.
> I cannot run explorer.exe manually from File>Run because there are no
> program associations. I can't see any recent errors because (no
> associations) I can't run control panel (any other way to do this?). I
> can't regedit for the same reasons.
>
> Shutdown>Restart and Shutdown>TurnOff from the Task Manager menu do
> not work. I figured a good boot may require a clean wrapup.
>
> If I close task manager, there are no icons on the desktop.
> Right-clicking shows no context menu, so I can't "Show desktop icons",
> "Arrange icons by", etc. Ctrl-alt-delete again doesn't re-open task
> manager, hard reset is the only option.
>
> Safe Boot IS available
> F8 does work, and I can select "with Command prompt" from the menu.
> While it shows the same logonui issue, I now have a command prompt,
> and can execute Notepad, and regedit! I still have no icons or context
> menu from the desktop, and browsing with the notepad Open dialog only
> shows some folders depending on how I drill down into them.
>
> I did not do any system configuration or installs of new software
> yesterday. I have fully updated NAV 2004 but it's possible that I got
> hit with a nasty virus (don't know how, this is a development machine
> and "surfs safe"). Problem is that I can't do a scan/check in this
> condition. I have daily backups of critical data, my last save of the
> registry was done a couple weeks ago. I can backup the registry now
> but am not sure how to do a check to get a delta and see what
> happened.
>
> Please provide some suggestions for how to get logonui to finish
> whatever it's doing, launch explorer.exe, and otherwise get this
> system back to normal. Any tips on what to look for in the registry or
> logs are welcome.
>
> I don't know if there is a way to boot into safe mode with a command
> prompt AND with networking. I'd really like to be able to extract my
> backups off of this system through the network, just in case the
> system can't be salvaged.
>
> Thanks!!
>

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