Black screen of death after logging in

[Tiggum]

Hey there, i usually do tech support for my house and a little at my job because i'm rather knowledgeable about computers, but i'm getting a problem that i can't seem to find on the web.

This is on one of the kiosks we use at my work for customers to transfer they pictures to our machines to print them. The computer in specific runs windows xp and doesnt have to much a history of problems hardware wise. It gets shut down every other nights so it runs for about 48 hours then is shut down and then booted up by an employee several hours later in the morning.

My particular problem involves the black screen of death. I am able to normally log into xp and browse a bit before it suddenly flashes to a black screen. No warning and no flickering of the screen are apparent when it does this. The main computer then registers this machine as off while it's still running after the BSOD appears.

I managed to check event viewer prior to it crashing and found nothing in the logs to indicate there was a problem with windows.

I've yet to find an article that discusses the ability to use xp before it black screening, mainly during boot and immediately after log in.

 

[Tmagic650]

Black screens in XP usually have to do with video. What are the specs of this computer, make and model would be nice?

 

[coolermaster]

Try this fix.

Go to Start Run Regedit
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon and change Userinit to "C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe,"

 

[Tiggum]

sadly the machine is using a proprietary (the company that made the kiosk) mobo and video card and i can't go tearing it a part to see if they have a name on them as they aren't listed during bios or through windows.

Also some sort of progress has been made somehow. When i'm in safe mode they computer won't crash at all and it allowed me to run antivirus to test and see if it was virus related. I turned up a few hits of adware but upon returning to a normal boot of windows the crash happened again.

I'm actually beginning to suspect that it's a problem with the program we use on the computer that autostarts a few minutes after loading into windows thats used to guide the user to transfer the pictures.

 

[Tmagic650]

Are the Windows Updates being automatically applied? There have been 120+ since Service Pack 3 was introduced. Running fine in Safe Mode means minimal drivers are active, and as I said earlier, a video driver might be corrupt. How are you going to fix this if you can't take it out of the kiosk?

 

[Tiggum]

I don't understand what you mean by "take it out of the kiosk", i can mess with the machine quite a bit but anything short of opening it and unplugging a few connectors for the peripherals i can't do much hardware wise.

The equipment looks like its an itx board with a riser card. All of this is surrounded by a cage of metal that i would not be allowed to take off. Essentially i want to troubleshoot as much as possible and see if i don't have to get the machine replaced.

I'm not entirely sure if the updates are being added but i plan to check next chance i get.

 

[Tmagic650]

The computer is not operational like it is, so can you reload the OS and software manually?