Today I had a gentleman leave his computer with me. He was running Vista, and it would lock up within 2 minutes of starting the computer. If you left it sitting at the login screen, it would lockup there, if you left it long enough. If you logged in immediately, it would lockup at whatever you were doing at the moment. You could still move the mouse, but you could not interact with any applications or open anything.
After much troubleshooting, I narrowed the problem down to the “Superfetch” service. To confirm this, you can safely set that service to “Disabled” (in services.msc)and reboot the computer (or just stop the service). After rebooting, or stopping the service, you can confirm that your machine does not lockup.
If indeed you find that your machine runs as it should with the “Superfetch” service disabled, then the fix is simple.
On your keyboard, hold the Windows Key and “R” at the same time. That should bring up the “run” dialog box. Type “prefetch” and hit “Ok.” Now you should see a folder with a bunch of files. Confirm that your address bar does indeed show that your are displaying the “prefetch” folder and then delete everything that you see.
Be careful! Don’t delete anything other than the contents of the Prefetch folder or your problems may be worse than what you started with! 
Now start the “Superfetch” service again and you should be cool!
All the best,
Luke
This problem has several symptoms but basically what is happening is that when a user logs in, they get no desktop icons, no start menu, and no task bar. If you do a CTRL+ALT+DEL, you will see that explorer.exe is not running, but you can do a File->New Task and start it. Once started, everything is normal.
You may login and the computer just logs you out immediately without a chance to do the CTRL+ALT+DEL and task manager thing.
In either case, the solution is the same. The problem is due to a missing userinit.exe file. This file should be located in C:\Windows\System32 (if you are in XP). You can restore it from your operating system CD by either starting explorer and browsing your i386 folder on the disk or, if your computer is logging you out before you can do that, you will have to boot from the CD and use the recovery console.
All the best!
Luke
Well, while trying to start an IPSec service today, I got this error:
IPSec Error
Error 10107: A system call that should never fail has failed.
Almost made me laugh… anyway, I definitely agree about the “should never fail” part. Most of my time I spend fixing or troubleshooting things that “shouldn’t have broken!”
Ok, the problem and the fix?
The problem is corrupted Winsock. The fix is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811259 or you can use this little tool to do it for you: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/winsockxpfix.html (which is what I did)
Anyway, let’s go see what else shouldn’t be doing what it is doing.
