[compnovo]

Hi folks,
I was just talking to my son who has a homebuilt PC running Windows 7 HP, and he had something strange happen a couple of weeks ago. One morning when he cold booted the PC it looked like he had booted to a guest account (although he doesn't have one enabled on his system). The default Win7 desktop was there, no recently launched app's were in the Start menu, nor were any of the pinned app's, the shortcuts on the taskbar were gone, and the drivers for his fancy mouse had to be reinstalled. However, all recent documents were still on the desktop, albeit rearranged. He performed a system restore and everything has been stable since with no issues, so we have nothing to troubleshoot.

Have any of you ever run into this, or heard of it before? It's a new one on me.

[coastie65]

compnovo, on 10 May 2012 - 12:42 PM, said:

Hi folks,
I was just talking to my son who has a homebuilt PC running Windows 7 HP, and he had something strange happen a couple of weeks ago. One morning when he cold booted the PC it looked like he had booted to a guest account (although he doesn't have one enabled on his system). The default Win7 desktop was there, no recently launched app's were in the Start menu, nor were any of the pinned app's, the shortcuts on the taskbar were gone, and the drivers for his fancy mouse had to be reinstalled. However, all recent documents were still on the desktop, albeit rearranged. He performed a system restore and everything has been stable since with no issues, so we have nothing to troubleshoot.

Have any of you ever run into this, or heard of it before? It's a new one on me.

Hey Comp, It may have done fine on just doing a reboot. Sounds like a squirrelly boot and I think I may have seen that once, but not with Windows 7.

[compnovo]

coastie65, on 10 May 2012 - 02:19 PM, said:

Sounds like a squirrelly boot and I think I may have seen that once, but not with Windows 7.

You're probably right. I asked my son if there had been a power failure around the time of the unusual behavior: there had been, but he thought there was some time between the outage and the strange boot.

[snorg]

When haywire things like that happen the best thing to try first is shutdown then boot into safe mode wait 5 minutes and then reboot.

You should try things like that before you go to extreme measures like system restore.

[compnovo]

snorg, on 11 May 2012 - 03:18 AM, said:

You should try things like that before you go to extreme measures like system restore.

Hey snorg,
System restore isn't an extreme measure, it's simply a rollback to an earlier time. Are you perhaps thinking of a restore to factory defaults (that retail computers can do from a recovery partition)? That's not what I'm referring to here, and isn't possible with a home built PC anyway (we call that a clean install ).

[coastie65]

compnovo, on 11 May 2012 - 07:33 AM, said:

snorg, on 11 May 2012 - 03:18 AM, said:

You should try things like that before you go to extreme measures like system restore.

Hey snorg,
System restore isn't an extreme measure, it's simply a rollback to an earlier time. Are you perhaps thinking of a restore to factory defaults (that retail computers can do from a recovery partition)? That's not what I'm referring to here, and isn't possible with a home built PC anyway (we call that a clean install ).

Yeah, a very clean install.

[snorg]

compnovo, on 11 May 2012 - 07:33 AM, said:

snorg, on 11 May 2012 - 03:18 AM, said:

You should try things like that before you go to extreme measures like system restore.

Hey snorg,
System restore isn't an extreme measure, it's simply a rollback to an earlier time. Are you perhaps thinking of a restore to factory defaults (that retail computers can do from a recovery partition)? That's not what I'm referring to here, and isn't possible with a home built PC anyway (we call that a clean install ).

Ya I know what system restore is, its more extreme than simply rebooting to safe mode.

[LiveBrianD]

To be honest, I don't think I've ever used System Restore. I just nuke the OS install whenever I have a problem.

[compnovo]

snorg, on 11 May 2012 - 04:30 PM, said:

compnovo, on 11 May 2012 - 07:33 AM, said:

snorg, on 11 May 2012 - 03:18 AM, said:

You should try things like that before you go to extreme measures like system restore.

Hey snorg,
System restore isn't an extreme measure, it's simply a rollback to an earlier time. Are you perhaps thinking of a restore to factory defaults (that retail computers can do from a recovery partition)? That's not what I'm referring to here, and isn't possible with a home built PC anyway (we call that a clean install ).

Ya I know what system restore is, its more extreme than simply rebooting to safe mode.

Okay, I guess it just isn't extreme to me. No big deal, and definitely quicker and easier than "nuking the OS install" (I'm looking at you, LiveBrian. ).

All this debate doesn't help answer the question of why it happened in the first place. I think coastie's right, it's probably just one of those Windows things.

[LiveBrianD]

I suppose it was just a Redmond-hickup of some sort. Just yesterday, the audio on a teacher's computer went haywire - it was outputting through the internal speaker no matter what, not through the 3.5mm jack on the machine. I have no idea why that happened, but reinstalling the audio driver solved it. (Come on HP, does the realtek driver really need to be 80MB? And why ask me if I have Win7 32-bit or 64-bit when you'll give me the same driver package anyway?)

[mjd420nova]

I don't want to alarm anyone, but all the cases I've seen where the OS fails to come up as per previous but comes up with a "guest" login, it was a virus at work and attempting to cover irs tracks. The first thing the user did was try to do a scan and found it baulked or just froze. A reboot to safe mode and a virus scan from there found a couple trojans and corrupted files. Things returned to normal after that. It would seem a restore might be premature but I guess you have to go with what works for you.

[compnovo]

mjd420nova, on 12 May 2012 - 03:45 AM, said:

I don't want to alarm anyone, but all the cases I've seen where the OS fails to come up as per previous but comes up with a "guest" login, it was a virus at work and attempting to cover irs tracks. The first thing the user did was try to do a scan and found it baulked or just froze. A reboot to safe mode and a virus scan from there found a couple trojans and corrupted files. Things returned to normal after that. It would seem a restore might be premature but I guess you have to go with what works for you.

Thanks mjd, I'll pass this info along to my son.