Share via

Issues with 24H2 and UAC prompts and screen lock?

Anonymous
2024-11-05T17:03:14+00:00

-Edit: Adding what I have found to be the fix below my original post content

-Edit 2: It seems that my fix did not work for someone else reporting the same problem. My issues seemed to go away after updating my lock screen settings, but this does not seem to be a guaranteed fix.

Hello,

Shortly after updating to 24H2 on Windows 11 Pro, I've had extremely detrimental issues where the only fix I can find is to force a reboot of my device. I am on a domain joined Dell XPS 15 9500. Hoping someone might have an idea on what I might be able to try to fix these issues

  1. After an hour or two from signing in, I will run into an issue where a UAC dialogue tries to pop up on my screen but never shows up. I am logged in as a standard user and have to elevate with my admin credentials. I tried waited minutes for it, and it never comes up on my screen. The only way I've been able to try and get out of this situation is by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del. And when I do this, my input is all completely frozen. My screen will render with new items such as a new Teams message, but I can not click on anything and there is no input accepted from my keyboard. The only way I seem to be able to get out of this situation is to force a reboot.
  2. After locking my computer and walking away for even a few minutes, I come back to a black screen. I'm able to see my mouse pointer, but that is it. No login screen, no background, nothing. Again the only way to fix this is to reboot my computer.

Things I've tried:

  1. dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
  2. sfc /scannow
  3. Installing all available windows updates and driver updates
  4. I've looked through the event viewer but I have not found anything helpful so far

I have one other person on our domain who experienced the issue with the UAC prompt locking up Windows 11 Pro, which leads me to believe that this may not be a problem with my device. The laptops are of different makes as well.

Screenshot of my sysinfo:

***moved from Windows / Windows 11 / Performance and system failures***

My Answer: From what we can tell from testing, I believe the issue was somehow caused by windows spotlight being selected for the lock screen. I'm not quite sure why. But me and the other person experiencing this both had the issue go away after changing our lock screen to a static image. This looks to have resolved both the UAC freezing issue and the black-screen lock screen issue.

I'm not sure if he also used to have a static image before the update changed it windows spotlight, or if the windows spotlight is running into issues for other reasons. Everything seems normal now though so I'm going to leave my lock screen as a static image and monitor other users to see if they have similar problems

Windows for business | Windows Client for IT Pros | Directory services | User logon and profiles

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question. To protect privacy, user profiles for migrated questions are anonymized.

0 comments

27 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2024-11-14T09:13:11+00:00

    Are you using an antivirus solution? If so, my issue seemed to coincide with unloading my antivirus for a couple of days. I'm not sure why that would fix a problem like this, but it's the only other thing I had directly tried that lined up with the problem going away

    Yes, our org is using MS Defender, managed via MS cloud. We have 24H2 installed on 5 devices: my laptop, 2 virtual test machines of mine and 2 physical workstations. As fas as I know, my laptop is the only problematic one. At some point at managed to use my laptop for a week with no issues, but now I can pretty much systematically crash it with UAC / lock if I want.

    This is a really weird bug/issue and not too common it seems. I've managed to find only 3 or 4 mentions of this after lots of Googling. All of them were on domain joined devices.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2024-11-18T18:32:26+00:00

    Running 24H2, I've experienced something similar but noticed a couple of specifics in my case. I can reproduce the hang under the following conditions:

    1. After opening a Windows Terminal using an admin account to get an elevated prompt:

    AND

    A. I attempt to open an elevated Terminal again later (effectively hanging on the second UAC prompt)

    OR

    B. My machine goes to lock screen (user-invoked lockscreen OR normal idle time is reached)

    If I just elevate my privs when opening Powershell (not Terminal), the issue is not reproduced.

    If I reduce the UAC security setting to 'not dim the screen', the issue is not reproduced for 1A scenario, but it does still occur for 1B scenario.

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2024-11-19T18:35:16+00:00

    Seems like more people are running into this now... Did you try any of the things I mentioned that I tried before the issue stopped happening? One thing I forgot to mention is that I turned off all widgets on my lock screen too (weather, news, etc.)

    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2024-11-20T17:52:13+00:00

    Yes, I tried various combos of lockscreen settings - widgets were already disabled and I already had a static image.

    By chance, were you specifically using Windows Terminal when you were elevating privs via UAC? Again, I can't reproduce the issue if I just elevate using the same actions (rt click > run as admin) opening Powershell directly instead of WT.

    0 comments
  5. Anonymous
    2024-11-25T18:40:38+00:00

    Unfortunately this was something that could happen any time I tried to elevate anything, such as updating an installed application. I never tried using only Powershell rather than the Terminal because I didn't see any correlation at the time. I do use the Terminal regularly though.

    I feel like the Terminal is unrelated since I changed nothing with it myself, but at the same time I don't even know what fixed the problem for me. I tried a couple of silly things and then all of a sudden I was having no issues at all. The only other thing I can think of is that someone changed a group policy without my knowledge. There may have been one drive trying to be mapped that I didn't have access to that stopped being applied. But beyond that, any other GPO could have changed without my knowledge.

    I wish I could offer more to everyone having this problem, it stinks that it fixed for me but my changes aren't fixing for anyone else :(

    0 comments