your computer is locked?

my dad leaves his pc on all day and when he goes to it to do what he does he just presses the space bar to bring it out of power saving mode, today he did this to find YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN LOCKED on his screen and only he or micosoft can unlock it? anyone ever herd of this? he tells me it wont evan accept his name or password? any ideas?
thanks

my dads pc did this, somthing to do with a windows update installing itself while away from the computer net framwork or somthing, and he didnt know what the password was.

got round it in the end, PM me if it sounds like the same thing and ill let you know how we fixed it

hey marshall sounds like the same thing, u off to the swancote tonight?

[Spiderman]

Could be the new functionality of the WGA tool (windows genuine advantage).
Its designed to check that you are not running copied / pirated Windows on your machine.
Its been getting a bad press recently as it seems that not only does it do this check once but it connects on a daily basis to MS servers and sends encrypted data back and forth. And no firewall can stop it doing this from what ive read so far about it.

One of our machines here recently installed the tool by mistake (mistake that he didnt follow the instructions i mailed to everyone saying DONT INSTALL THE WGA. Guess that must have been a bit ambiguous for him eh?)

Now on start up we get a message saying "You may be a victim of software piracy..blah..blah..blah"

If his copy of Windows is genuine then it may be that the WGA tool has just glitched on install as it been said it can do.

HTH and good luck to him.

his Windows is genuine, (home edition)

[TSM]

Nothing wrong, someone has changed the settings for either the screensaver and set it to ask for a password or there is an option in the Power control panel that says 'Ask for password after resume from standby or hibernation' or something like that and it has been ticked. Check both of them, its possable that only one has been checked. Many coporate systems have this so that users comps get locked when they go away for a dump. Also on XP Home/Pro depending on the setup pressing Windows Key+L can also result in the same message.

kwak,

check the screen saver / power management settings - in xp there's an option that says 'on resume, display welcome screen'. our pc's at work have that option checked and they do exactly what you're describing.

if that doesnt solve it, it could be the .net framework that's causing it.

go to start > run, and type 'control userpasswords2', there's a check box that says 'users must enter a user name and passord to use this computer', make sure it's unchecked & click ok.

failing that it could be the WGA tool like spidey said. try using system restore to roll back to the point before it was installed, cos any windows updates should automatically create a restore point. if you manage to do that, the next time windows update informs you of the WGA update being available, deselect it from the download list and select the option not to be reminded about that update in the future, so it shouldn't install itself again.

HTH

EDIT: I was still typing when TSM posted - what he said!

cheers! thanks for info.