I have a very strange issue, in a pretty recent installation of Windows 7 Enterprise 32bit. When I power up the machine, i get the Press Ctrl+Alt+Del prompt like it should since it's joined to a domain. Hit CAD, it shows the domain's legal warning. Click ok, and instead of the normal user/pass login prompt, you get a small empty picture frame that says Other User, and a cancel button. Click Other User and you get the normal login box prompting for your username and password, ready to log on to the domain, and you can login just fine from there. Once I'm already logged in and the screen gets locked (either using Win-L or letting the screen saver lock it), when i move the mouse to wake up the screen it shows me the normal Press CAD to unlock message, with my username below as logged in, but it also shows a Switch User button. If I press CAD, the ONLY thing on screen is a Cancel button. If I click Switch User (at the CAD screen), the screen flickers a bit, then goes to a Press CAD screen (which does NOT indicate that anyone is logged on), and then does the same stuff as the previous paragraph, as if I had just powered on the machine. If I login as the currently logged on user, it logs me back in with all my apps still running just fine, but this adds like 5-6 more clicks and requires me to type in my username just to unlock the machine. To be clear - I don't want to disable the CAD prompt - it's supposed to be there since this is a domain computer. I just want the rest of the login/unlock stuff to behave normally: - when I power up and hit CAD, I want it to remember the last logged in user so I can just enter my password and go. - when i hit CAD to unlock a machine that i'm already logged onto, I want it to just prompt me for my password and let me get back to work, not jump through a buncha hoops. It used to be that way, but not anymore. And it certainly isn't normal behavior for windows.

I tried hiding fast user switching via regedit (link: http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-enable-disable-fast-user-switching-in-windows-xp-and-windows-vista/ ), and now I can't unlock the machine - pressing CAD only gives me a Cancel button and nothing else. had to do a hard reboot, and the initial login was still acting the same - CAD, dismiss legal, click other user, login. I can reimage a machine and it behaves for a bit but then starts doing this. It's not a piece of software being installed since it happens on both a VM and a physical machine, and my image is about as barebones as it can be - win7enterprise x86 sp1, all patched up as of 5/12/2011, and a few add-ons like visual C++ redist's, all the .net stuff, silverlight, etc... all microsoft products (no adobe or other 3rd party apps). I almost wonder if this is some GPO specific to win7 that our admins don't know about since we're just getting started with win7 here...

Well I found the solution, and it was partly my fault. I noticed that the user icon at the top of the start menu was blank, and that when I went into the control panel to change the user icon, the default icon in the lower right was also blank (even though it let me select it). once I chose a different icon, the unlock issue went away. I had replaced c:\programdata\microsoft\user account pictures\user.bmp so that all new users would get the company logo instead of the flower icon. Turns out when I created the .bmp, I saved it in 32bit color, since I thought I'd read that it needed to be 32bit somewhere. On a whim, I went back into GIMP and saved it as 24bit, replaced the file on the machine, and lo and behold - everything's back to normal again!