Sun 14 Jan 2007
Recovering from winlogon.exe application error
Posted by Michael Brandonisio under Computers , PersonalDigg This Entry , [61] Comments
Hello,
Here I am today, attempting to recover my Windows XP Pro computer from an error after rebooting it, “winlogon.exe Application Error” Something about cannot write to some memory location. I did some searching via Google, No luck. I’m trying a system repair. Cross your fingers. If I can recover my accountig files, I’ll move them to my Mac Mini.
I Hope this fixes it.
[edited: 2 hours later]
Sort of fixed it. It is fixed enough to boot, login and recover and data I need. However the system is less than perfect. I cannot RDP to the XP box from my Mac Mini anymore and I keep getting errors about not being able to start ICS or other services. I’ve tried to run windows update but it just hangs.
At this point I’m thinking that I’ll get what I can moved to an external drive and start from scratch. 
[edited: 8 hours later]
Windows Update finally responded. After spending much time running downloading updates and reinstalling IE. It seems to be working properly without error. What a head ache. I do most of my work on my Mac Mini and use this Windows box for validating web site designs and accounting. I’m vasilating between moving my accounting to my Mac using MYOB and just leaving the Windows box ass-is. I really did not want to spend so much time on this, but I need to get my tax papers prepared and it has all my accounting on it.
Sincerely,
Mike
February 16th, 2007 at 9:52 am
I had the same issue. It is a tedious process, but see if you can bring up the task manager. Find winlogon.exe under Processes. Right click and set priority down to normal. That seems to do the trick until the next reboot.
February 16th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Hi Frank,
Thanks for input. I cannot remeber what prompted the initial reboot, but after the first reboot I would get the winlogon.exe error. It did not matter what selection you made the system would complete reboot itself. The task manager was not an option since I could not even get to a log on screen.
Either way, it good to have more info. If the error comes up while still looking at a desktop then I’ll try this next time.
March 18th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
I’m having the same issue. I tried the task monitor trick but it said I could not do that. I’m think of doing a fresh install of XP. Could this be a hardware issue?
March 18th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Hi,
After I did an installation over the top of the existing XP files it worked fine. I have not had any other issues since then. Do remember that you will have to Download and apply all of the security patches to get the system back to mormal since your putting an out of date CD version over a up to date version.
Mike
April 19th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Guys if you Spybot runnuning on you pc then remove it. That’s what causes that winlogon.exe error
April 19th, 2007 at 10:25 am
Hi Jim,
Is Spybot the name of the program or process? Or did you mean Spybots in general? Any additional info you can provide would be great.
Mike
April 25th, 2007 at 4:28 am
I am facing same problem, is there anybody help us, please.
June 2nd, 2007 at 6:07 pm
I have the same problem, Now it is just loopiing. Tried setting bios to default, no luck. Tried bring up under “Safe Mode’. np luck…
I can’t even get to my logon screen. Please, someone, how do I get in to my computer – XP Pro…
June 4th, 2007 at 5:09 am
Hi Jim,
That is pretty much what happened to me. I ended up installing XP over the top of itself and then patched it to the latest patch level. It seems to be working fine since then.
Mike
July 8th, 2007 at 7:26 am
Hi Ime having the same problem someone please help i have loads of things i need to recover it just keeps going over trying to load up get to windows logo then reboots continuous and says about tcant read the memory winlogon.exe i cant even load up into safe mode
Julie
July 8th, 2007 at 7:47 am
Hi Juli,
I have not found any other way to recover from this other than installing windows over the top of your current installation. After doing that run windows update until there are no more updates.
Mike
October 12th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
I too am having the same winlogon.exe application error problem. I too uninstalled the “Spybot” program that another computer guy installed on my desktop. I cannot get it to boot at all. I can never even get to a screen that gives me the Safe-Mode option. I have tried pressing “F8″ as it boots and it seems to just hang up there and do nothing. I will try to boot from the CD and will try to install XP over the top of it. I will report back
Cameron
January 7th, 2008 at 5:11 am
I just fixed the sam problem.
These are the steps that i tooked..
1. Boot with winxp cd
2. Log in to recovery console
3. chkdsk /r
it seems to work for now
)
January 7th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Hi Pixa,
I’m glad that worked for you. If this comes up again I’ll try that first.
If anyone reading this can confirm:
1. Boot with winxp cd
2. Log in to recovery console
3. chkdsk /r
Will correct this issue that would be great.
Mike
February 16th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
No, that did not work on mine, will have to reinstall over the top
February 17th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Hi Mike J,
Thanks for let me know.
Mike
February 21st, 2008 at 6:33 am
Guys, I’m an IT manager at a mid-sized company and we’ve had 15-20 machines suddenly start doing this in the last month. I’ve narrowed it down to an issue with the RPC and DCOM services; by default they are both set to “Restart the computer” if they can’t start.
We’re still working with Microsoft to determine why this suddenly started, but we have at least figured out that after several reboots and if you let it sit at the logon screen for a while before attempting to logon, you can sometimes get it to boot all the way into Explorer. If you get that lucky, go into your services and set the recovery options for both services to “Restart the service” instead of “Restart the computer”.
Hope this helps.
Frank
February 21st, 2008 at 6:46 am
Hi Frank,
Thanks for input. I’m going to look at a few computers over here to see what the RPC and DCOM services recover is set to.
Mike
March 5th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Hi guys,
Any idea on how to fix this if the computer just keeps rebooting, and I don’t have boot disk? The WINLOGIN.exe gray message box shows up for 1-2 seconds, then the machine reboots again. Un-ending cycle.
I have tried all the Safe Modes, same thing. Tried the debugging mode, it just hung. All this has occured after doing the upgrade to SP 4. Came up once, then this scenario.
I don’t have a boot disk as this was company computer my previous company let me keep when they let me go.
WIN2000 op system.
Is there some keystrokes I can do at startup that would stop the cycle and at least let me start the computer?
Thanks,
Craig
March 5th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Hi Craig,
If you do not have you OS disk you may be able to do something from a a dos prompt. I’d look at trying to stop the restart by changing the recovery options for the service. I’m really sure how you’d do this either. Sorry I cannot be more help.
Mike
March 5th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Thank for the reply Mike.
I did get a suggestion to try to get the task manager to pop up by pressing CTRL SHIFT ESC when the message pops up.
Just kind of shooting in the dark right now.
Craig
March 19th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
I tried Pixa’s suggestion and it worked fine for me. Seems like there was something wrong with my harddisk.
March 25th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Hey guys…my wife’s computer just had this same issue and I was able to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL before the error message popped up and then login and do a system restore. No sure if that’ll work for anybody else, but just thought I’d throw this out there (problem happened after the Monday update from MS Update).
March 27th, 2008 at 9:10 am
The same winlogon.exe issue.
I started with the installation CD and used the repair option.
That’s worked fine for me.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:20 am
For systems where the winlogon.exe error popus up with an OK button – DO NOT press OK. The machine seems to run just fine with the dialog box pushed out of the way.
Go into services, and set the Recovery options as listed above. That seems to work like a champ upon subsequent reboots.
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Hi
You sound like you know what you’re talking about. can I ask a question. I’m going to save time and tell you what’s mine. I have a problem with a logon.exe my win xp pro froze on the log in screen and I can’t reboot with f8 or any other trics like holding the ctlr or any other F#. plus I can’t reboot from the cd so I can repair the win xp. is there anything out there that I can stick in the cd rom and make the pc reboot from it
thanks for your time
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Hi Rhiwi,
If you are having issues booting to any CD then you need to edit your bios settings to allow booting from the CD before the HD or floppy.
Mike
April 8th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Hi Frank,
Thank you very much. I had got exactly the same situation as yours. Trick with services worked fine.
July 1st, 2008 at 3:59 pm
press f8 during startup before the winlogo comes up, and choose “last configuration that worked”
Thats what fixed it for me guys!
July 1st, 2008 at 4:00 pm
I also set the recovery options for those aforementioned services, so that might have had something to do with it as well, but that alone did not work until I did the F8 “Last Good known Configuration” trick.
July 3rd, 2008 at 7:32 am
Just passing by on a Google search, and found your page to be among the MOST attractive I’ve stumbled upon. Here’s telling ya so.
July 3rd, 2008 at 7:40 am
Hi Diane,
Thank you. The theme is by http://www.vanillamist.com
Mike
July 13th, 2008 at 7:07 am
j’ai un sérieux problème avec ce message qui apparait quand j’allume mon HP 530 avec win XP SP2 ” winlogon.exe application error”. je vous en prie aidez – moi à faire quelque chose sinon je suis bloqué complétement.
auto-translate:
Best regards
July 13th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Hi Uwitonze,
Have you tried any of the techniques here?
auto-translate:
Mike
July 17th, 2008 at 4:07 am
I suddenly started facing this problem after running a couple of anti spyware apps and restarting Windows. Relying on the iPod Touch for now in an attempt to fix my laptop. Tried the F8 return to last known good configurations method but unfortunately it did not work for me. Any other alternatives especially when I’m without a Windows cd? Thanks.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:24 am
Hi Eu Jin,
I too tried most the attempts to fix this without going through the use of a Windows CD to update the OS from the CD, but none worked for me. If you have a proper product code maybe you can barrow the media from someone Or MS may even send you a disk. I think they are around $30, it’s not a license, only media.
Mike
July 17th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Thanks for the quick reply Mike, appreciate your efficiency. I managed to borrow an XP cd off a friend and currently trying out the chkdsk /r method which was pointed out by Pixa on the 7th of Jan 08.. The check is taking quite some time so I’ve decided to leave it alone to do its thing. Hopefully things will work out just fine for me. Will keep you guys updated on my outcome! In the mean time, any other possible methods would be great just in case I fail to fix the problem.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
It didn’t work. Looks like I’m running out of options. Would a reinstall of Windows clear my HD? I’ve got heaps of important data which have not been backed up elsewhere.
July 17th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Hi Eu Jin,
No, a reinstall of Windows will not clear your HD. When you boot to the CD to can select recovery console. From there you can move files to a flash drive or something.
I’m surprised that this did not fix it. I had run windows update over and over and over to get it working though.
Did you make sure or test for virus or worm? You have a contaminated HD that reinfected itself.
Mike
July 17th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Thats good to know. I’ll probably do that, reinstall the whole windows. How do I use the recovery console to extract files though? Can’t quite remember the DOS commands. But then again, the whole Windows issue should be harmless to my files stored on the HD if I’m not wrong? And to your final question Mike, yes all this was a result of restarting after running an anti spyware program, Superantispyware if I’m not wrong. Cheers.
July 18th, 2008 at 7:16 am
Hi Eu Jin,
Have the flash drive plugged in to the USB port before putting. It should be assigned a drive letter at boot. I’m going to guess Drive letter D, E or F depending if you have other partitions or drives on the system.
Here is a link on MS DOS commands.
http://www.computerhope.com/msdos.htm
Basically your only backing up your data. Also rename the windows folder to ‘windows-old’. When you boot to the CD next time you can choose to install windows in a non-standard folder like ‘windows2′ or ‘windows’.
Mike
September 9th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
hmmm…I was getting the same error message. But used the click here underlined for details. Stated the problem was with the uxtheme.dll file. So from msconfig, I uncheck the theme services. Rebooted with no errors. Realized that it turned off my XP Theme. So went into Services from Admin Tools, and set disable to automatic and click the Start button, to start the service. Then rebooted. Have not received the error since.
UXTheme is the XP Theme package, but was recently updated in a patch. So maybe chalk it up as a bad install. Now repaired.
Another option is to go to c:\windows\system32 and find the uxtheme.dll file. Rename it to uxtheme.dll.old. Then restart. Should repair, reinstall itself.
November 13th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Hi all
I had a customer with the same winlogon.exe application error looks like uninstalling SP3 fixed it after 4 days of pointless virus scans
good luck to the rest of you
November 25th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Hi,
I tried CHKDSKs / renaming the winlogon.exe hoping it would be rebuilt, fixboot and mbr but all with no luck.
Couldnt get in windows.
Re-installing over current installation as we speak.
Note: This happened when installing SP2 on an XP machine. That is ALL i did, windows update caused me hours of messing around.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Hi all
“HijackThis” fixed winlogon.exe problem for me.
i scan with hijackthis and fixed winlogon error.
seems like Computer working fine.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
hi all.
just for your information.
in my case, winlogon.exe problem occured in a fresh copy of windoes XP Pro.i installed a fresh copy after formating HDD,and system was working fine untill i installed sm buscontroller driver.
systme gave me this error after installing sm bus controller driver.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:04 am
Hi,
This really annoying winlogon bug started appearing for me this morning, after I went to windowsupdate.com and installed a bunch of hotfixes.
I tried all the solutions above except repairing windows. No joy.
Then for kicks I uninstalled IE8 Beta2 (silly me for having installed it on a production machine!)….. and voila! The winlogon bug is gone.
Im very happy now.
So add this to the list of things one could try.
Thanks for the help!
/Simon
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:54 am
How does one get in to “services” I’m new at this so a step-by-step to fixing this winlogon.exe error would be very helpful. The exact message I get is: The instruction at “0×7751eaea” referenced memory at 0×656c6389”. The memory could not be read.
Click OK to terminate or click Cancel to debug.
Thanks in advance,
Jeff
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Got hte same problem win winlogon.exe and found this post in another formum:
’solution for this is
goto BIOS security option and if there is any memory security then disable it.’
In my BIOS version there is no setting for this, but i diabled all existing security options and this helps in my case
February 3rd, 2009 at 1:16 am
Hi Marko,
Do you have more information on what you found. Typically BIOS setting don’t need changing due once your computer is built.
I don’t think disabling any BIOS settings will have an affect on this type error.
Mike
February 13th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
i have also tried pixa’s check disk, as of right now it’s working
i’ll keep you posted as this has been an on going battle at my work
May 12th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
I believe it’s related to memory usage. I get the winlogon error message only when another process is taking a ridiculous amount of memory, most recently Gnu Emacs.
May 12th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Thanks Ben.
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:55 am
Thanks Bonnie, I’m gonna try your idea. I didn’t have this problem untill I used installed some theme stuff, I guess it might me related.
June 17th, 2009 at 7:40 am
I got the same thing here:
winlogon.exe – Application Error : The instruction at “0×010109ae” referenced memory at “0×00000364″. The memory could not be “written”.
Then,
Log On to Windows: winlogon.exe – Application Error : The instruction at “0×010109ae” referenced memory at “0×00000364″. The memory could not be “written”.
Do you know how to find them? Running in Windows XP.
June 17th, 2009 at 7:40 am
Again, in above. It’s appeared when you started Windows. Do you know how to fix this?
June 17th, 2009 at 7:43 am
Hi windowsnt,
Have you tried any of the suggests on this page?
Mike
June 25th, 2009 at 3:15 am
Hi Mike
This winlogon.exe error popped up on my login screen after I patched my computer with this UXTHEME patcher or something, meant to allow my computer to use third-party themes and skins. The patch was successful, but upon reboot, I keep getting the same error. Clicking OK reboots my computer again, clicking Cancel to debug just hangs the PC. I can’t get past the login screen and I’m in a desperate situation. I’ve tried most of the solutions and am currently running the Recovery Console. I hope it works, if not, what do you suggest? Thanks.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:47 am
Hi Joel,
to fix issue I had to install the OS back over it self then patch to the current level. You can see from the post it can take some time.
Sorry I don’t have an easier fix.
Mike
August 19th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
I am a SW architect / SW Engineer at HP with way too much knowledge about Windows and LInux Operating Systems and under the cover stuff:
I am helping a friend with her lappy as it was FULL of many many viruses. I have removed all but the “winlog.exe problem”.
When I fix this, I’ll report back.
In the mean time here are some tips from my “room of knoweledge”
1. At home, I use Avast (www.avast.com) anti software. It is free for non-ommercial use. For those that don’t want to spend money and pay yearly license updates, THIS IS FOR YOU! It auto updates, and has many automatic features. You do need to perform manual scans periodically.
2. Go get the Hiron Boot CD (www.hirensbootcd.net/) from the WEB and this will boot your lappy and allow you to interact with your HARD DRIVE (view files, copy files to a USB thumb drive / USB stick (what ever we call it!!!)
For those that don’t know, a CD image on the web will most likely be ISO file (i.e. myCDImage.iso). You download it, then you “burn it to a blank CD”. Of course you need a Read / Write CD drive to do this. Most lappys now come with one, but you can buy an external USB one for $100 or so.
3. If you ever need to recover files from your Laptop hard drive, you can always do the following:
a) remove it from your lappy
b) insert it into an external hard drive external usb case
c) plug it into another Windows computer and you can browse the files and copy what you need.
NOTE: For $20 – $40 you can buy an EMPTY external HARD DRIVE box that has at least a USB plug.
NOTE2: Besure to look carefully at the labeling on the box and make sure the hard drive in your lappy will work. Because you may have one of the following types of hard drives in your lappy: ATA (aka PATA – it will a two row 40 pin connector), SATA / eSATA (it has a completely different port arrangement) Ask the sales clerk to help you.
August 20th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Holy Crap Dan,
Thank you for the brain dump. That is lots of good stuff. I’m temped to re-post as a proper entry.
Mike