screen goes blank after logoff

Hi,

I'm new to XP. Have setup several accounts, mainly for my kids. Tonight when someone logged off their account the screen went blank and wouldn't come back on.

The computer was still on and the hard drive was still talking to my office lan. Moving the mouse and using the keyboard didn't bring it back.

What gives?

Marty

 

Ok since a few ppl have looked at this though noone's posted a reply I'll post a reply myself.

The problem may be happening when logging off an account and leaving the mouse motionless. At least that's my current idea, so making a point of moving the mouse around during the logging off time so far I haven't seen the system get 'lost'.

But since the problem is intermittent, this may just be coincidence. Guess whether a box has 1/2 a meg of ram and a processor clock speed in kips, or a 1/4 gig of ram and clock speed in gips, they're still computers, and they __are__ aggravating at times.

Marty

 

marty - been sorta away for a couple of days and just saw this thread.

The behavior you describe should not be happening. At all.

It will always help with XP threads if you say Home or Pro since they behave very differently in some circumstances.

For this, also need to know if you are using fast user switching or not.

And what effect, if any, a CAD (ctrl-alt-del) has when you are at a blank screen.

Something that may well help and certainly can't hurt is to follow the advice from mflynn in This thread and down a bit. Starts out talking about clean up.

 

Hi Newt,

Thanks for writing back. This is XP Home and less than one month old!

By fast user switching you mean the switch user option vs. the logoff option? I've only noticed this with the logoff option.

As said, this seems to not be happening if we make a point of moving the mouse during a logoff. And it just occurred to me that the mouse, being an optical mouse and wireless - plus a wireless keyboard, is on the usb port.

Or is it the keyboard? It's actually the receiver which plugs into the box and that has two plugs, one usb and I think the other's a ps1.

I just tried to replicate the problem and notice that logging on and off is very slloooooow. So I guess something is amiss. Will read the other posting and write back probably tomorrow.

Marty

 

Marty,
This may be a long shot (or maybe not). If the screen is going blank with absolutely nothing, then it sounds like a video driver problem. Logging out of an account may just be the trigger that causes the problem.

I recently brought an Nvidia based card (GF4 4200, 128MB RAM) and I first loaded the latest drivers from the card manufacturer (Leadtek) and after a few days I was having occasional problems, Lockups in one game and the TV card would have a blank screen and sometimes lock the pc solid. Then it got worse, the PC would boot into BIOS ok in VGA mode but go to a blank screen as it switched to SVGA mode to boot Windows. Loading the NVIDIA reference drivers has cured all problems.

So check the video cards vendor for the latest drivers or use the latest chipset reference drivers if available?

On a new system with a new monitor I would suggest 32bit colour, 85Hz refresh rate and make sure windows (XP should anyway) selects the correct monitor you are using instead of Plug and Play or standard monitor.

Cheers,

Paul

 

Hi Paul,

This sounds reasonable to me. Turns out I did have a plug 'n play (on a brand new Dell) and ran the hardware wizard and now it's got the Dell E772 monitor drivers installed.

Hope you're right and that was the problem. FWIW I can only get a refresh rate of 75 @ 32bit colors, but that seems ok for me. At 60 refresh to get a higher resolution the screen looks blurry to me.

Guess I need a better monitor if I want a really big resolution. I assume a 64M video card is adequate for more resolution but the tube isn't.

Thanks,
Marty

 

More info.

The problem is still occurring. Since it's intermittent I'll split up what I know from what I think:

I know:

- the screen sometimes goes blank when a user logs off their account

- when this happens the computer goes dead, CAD does nothing and I have to power down and reboot

I think:

- moving the mouse during the logoff process seems to prevent this from happening

- installing the E772 drivers for my monitor hasn't stopped the problem (Dell sent this 2350 w/ the default pnp driver installed)

I haven't tried the clean up stuff yet from that other thread. We have six accounts on this computer and sometimes an account gets logged off, other times we do user switching. The computer is about 1 month old, haven't done anything to the OS.

And here I thought XP was going to solve all my problems with pc instability! I think an old fashioned calculator is the only thing that can do that.

Marty