Home is where I lay my head - All Comments

re: Upgrading Windows Server 2008 R2 to 2012 – via RDP

Brent Yager — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:15:20 GMT

I'm going to try the RDP solution now. The actual PC is only 100 feet away, but I'm lazy and want to see it work this way. Will post my findings.

re: Windows 8 - Nothing happens when you initiate a shutdown or hangs at the “shutting down” donut.

Darren — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:02:40 GMT

@ pwigle - I emailed a zipped. ETL file to you last night so please let me know if you did not receive it. It as a 280 MB file that compressed down to about 28 MB!

Again, thank you for the kind offer to help me.

re: Windows 8 - Nothing happens when you initiate a shutdown or hangs at the “shutting down” donut.

Darren — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:35:20 GMT

@ pwigle - I will reinstall WPT tonight and send you the Dropbox link via the email address you gave me.

Again, I cannot thank you enough for offering to help. Once I know what the cause is then I have a better chance of (hopefully!) resolving this extremely odd issue.

Of course, if I never press Ctrl-Shift-Esc or press Ctrl-Alt-Del then select Task Manager from that Lock screen (or whatever it is called) then the winlogon.exe bug doesn't occur and I can shutdown or restart my PC normally. That's not an ideal solution though and more often than not I trigger it inadvertently because I'm so used to pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up Task Manager in Windows 7.

re: Windows 8 - Nothing happens when you initiate a shutdown or hangs at the “shutting down” donut.

pwigle — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:18:21 GMT

@Darren, I'm very curious what the issue could be. The rest of the default settings should work, 20-30 seconds of tracing should be enough (it's important that the trace is running during the high cpu).

Hope to hear from you!

re: Windows 8 - Nothing happens when you initiate a shutdown or hangs at the “shutting down” donut.

Darren — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:16:27 GMT

For some reason, the first part of my post has gone missing (it was quite a long post too!) so my existing reply looks a bit ignorant. Sorry about that.

Thanks for offering to help me. I do appreciate you offering your time. I have Dropbox so I have put the zipped .ETL files in their and send you the public link to the archive, hopefully later on tonight as I'm currently as work.

Thanks again.

re: Windows 8 - Nothing happens when you initiate a shutdown or hangs at the “shutting down” donut.

Darren — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:12:38 GMT

In the last few months I have been buying and installing a number of Stardock apps, starting with Start8 and then I have subsequently installed Decor8, Fences 2, WindowsFX 5.1, ObjectDock 2.0 and finally ModernMix. I believe the issue I'm having has occurred since installing those but it may just be a coincidence as I disabled all of them during testing last night and the winlogon.exe issue still occurred. Also, because they do run in Safe mode and I was still getting that issue there as well that pretty much confirms they are not the cause but I felt I'd mention them as other than games, which is the primary use for my PC, I have not installed much else in the way of apps.

I'm wondering if the issue may be related to .NET Framework as I recently had problems with it when using ObjectDock but, unlike with earlier versions of Windows, there is no way to uninstall then reinstall it as it part of the operating system. Believe you me, I tried. That said, the NET Verify Tool reports that all of them are OK (from 2.0 to 4.5) but I'm not entirely convinced because I have a niggling issue with GeForce Experience not opening from the system tray icon for example (although it does open from the desktop shortcut). The current NET Repair Tool also only supports up to Windows 7 and 4.0 so is useless on Windows 8.

Anyway, enough of that! I'll install WPT tonight and run the recorder before I trigger the glitch and leave it running for 20-30 seconds. Do I need to select any of More Options shown at the bottom of Windows Performance Recorder or just leave it on default?

re: Windows 8 - Nothing happens when you initiate a shutdown or hangs at the “shutting down” donut.

pwigle — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 07:51:55 GMT

Darren, if you can follow these steps I can analyze the trace for you:

1- Install the Windows Performance Toolkit like described here: blogs.technet.com/.../how-to-install-the-windows-8-performance-recorder.aspx

2 - Start "Windows Performance Recorder"

3 - Make sure that at "Performance Scenario" the default "General" is selected.

4 - Make sure that at "Detail Level" the default "Verbose" is selected.

5 - Hit Start

< repro the issue>

6 - Hit save

7- Hit cancel to stop tracing

8 - Zip the .ETL file that has been created

9 - Put the .ETL on a location I can download it and e-mail me the link (in case you don't have a location to store the .ETL let me know via e-mail and I'll open a workspace for you).

My e-mail address is pwigle @ microsoft . com (without the spaces).

re: Windows 8 - Nothing happens when you initiate a shutdown or hangs at the “shutting down” donut.

Darren — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 22:39:22 GMT

@ pwigle - Alas, my issue is not the same as yours and, unfortunately for me, I'm not proficient enough to understand how to use the Windows Performance Analyzer to identify what is causing it. I tried but I got horribly confused as to what I was doing. I did have an extra entry under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager for PDBoot but when I deleted it the issue still remained on rebooting. :(

The issue I have is rather strange... if I press Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the Lock screen then press Esc to exit it then winlogon.exe remains at 0% CPU use. If I right-click on the taskbar and select Task Manager then winlogon.exe remains at 0% CPU use.

However, if I press Ctrl-Alt-Del to go to the Lock screen then select Task Manager from there then I'm returned to the desktop without Task Manager opening and winlogon.exe shoots up to 15-25% CPU usage. This issue also occurs if I press Ctrl-Shift-Esc in an attempt to open Task Manager directly but it doesn't work and winlogon.exe shoots up to 15%+.

From that point, I can no longer use Ctrl-Alt -Del to go to the Lock Screen, athough I can still right-click on the taskbar to bring up Task Manager. When the high CPU bug occurs with winlogon.exe then I can no longer shutdown or restart as my PC just gets stuck and never completes its task. I then have to press the reset button on my case. As long as I don't press Ctrl-Shift-Esc or go to the Lock screen and select Task Manager then the winlogon.exe bug doesn't happen.

As I said, my issue is bizarre to say the least. I've tried disabling all startup apps and shutting down as many services as possible but the bug always returns if I do any of the things listed in the fourth paragraph. The only thing I haven't tried is booting into Safe mode to see if it happens there too...

re: Windows 8 - Nothing happens when you initiate a shutdown or hangs at the “shutting down” donut.

Hotfix — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:04:48 GMT

will there be a hotfix to address this issue?

re: Windows 8 - Nothing happens when you initiate a shutdown or hangs at the “shutting down” donut.

pwigle — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 09:47:15 GMT

@Darren, sounds like the same issue, if it isn't please contact me so we can grab a trace. (pwigle @ microsoft . com) Good luck!