Here is an odd one. Since Wed morning I noticed every time I came back from my PC it was locked (like hitting Windows Key + L; not frozen or malfunctioning). It got so annoying I finally set up a PIN number to use to unlock it.
After a few days of on and off trouble shooting, I identified the culprit by removing one background app at a time. I almost skipped Steam, but lo and behold, that’s what was causing it.
EDIT: I thought it was Steam, because if I exited it the PC wouldn’t lock. But now on further testing, without Steam running, it still does it.
This reminds me of the annoying troubleshooting I have to do when something keeps waking my computer out of sleep. Doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, mega annoying.
Tell me about it. Sleep/Power options (and Windows blatant disregard of the settings I want) is one of my biggest pet peeves.
But this is something else, I think.
Okay, a few more bits of info that seem important.
1 - Booting into safe mode and it still happens. That’s just crazy to me. However…
2 - Booting into safe mode OR normal boot with a newly created test user it does NOT happen.
So, local profile issue?
But I have a Microsoft account I log in with, how do I delete my profile…? To the Googles!
I believe I have fixed it. It was an issue with my local profile, after all. Since my test account (Agent Randy Beans) did NOT have it happen to it, I blew away my actual login profile (same way I ever have, under Advanced->User Accounts), recopied my files over from the cloud, and re-set up my pinned stuff. Back up and running, save games and documents/pictures seem to be intact, and best of all no more locking, even after 2-3 minutes. Man, what a strange issue.
It started Wed a.m. after a restart from the patch Tuesday cumulative roll-out. What is strange though is this happened, but also my task bar icons were blinking (that ended up being a now-completely dead USB stick I had plugged into my PC), and my auto-login settings in the Registry no longer work (though, maybe they do now that I fixed my profile…)
I guess we’ll never know exactly what it was, but I was going to suggest looking at this next:
Run secpol.msc and see if this is set:
This would cause your machine to lock after X seconds of inactivity. But not sure if it’s tied to a profile not, though it can be set via group policy.
Interesting. I see it’s Not Defined, but I almost wish I could go back and look at what that setting was before I wiped my profile. Well, at least re-building the profile only took a few minutes so it wasn’t a huge problem, though I’m sure to constantly think of settings I’m missing, or shortcuts I need to pin to the taskbar for the rest of the weekend, but nothing major. Thanks again for the suggestions, it was helpful to get the creative juices flowing and do some more trouble shooting.
