Remote unlock windows

Any other inappropriate content or behavior as defined by the Terms of Use or Code of Conduct. Any image, link, or discussion related to child pornography, child nudity, or other child abuse or exploitation. Sorry to hear you are experiencing issues and I would really like to help you find a resolution.

Have you unlocked the device under devices in your Microsoft account? Hope this helps. Details required : characters remaining Cancel Submit 1 person found this reply helpful. Was this reply helpful? Yes No. Sorry this didn't help. Thanks for your feedback. Is there a registry key or other setting I can tweak from the boot to command prompt to get the login to show me an administrator login, or enter the password from my microsoft account account?

Any way out of this short of a reinstall? Type the number of failed attempts before you want the account to be locked out. The default value is 0xb40 that is hexadecimal for 2, minutes two days. Modify this value to meet your network security requirements. If the account is locked out, the user can try to log on again after the lockout timer has run out. Or, you can delete the DomainName:UserName value in the following registry key:.

For more information about the remote access client lockout feature, see Account Lockout Policy. Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Contents Exit focus mode. Note: I'm referring to the user who has logged on via the physical keyboard and monitor So, when the computer is locked and the interactive user hits Ctrl-Alt-Delete and enters his or her credentials, the desktop is restored and the user can continue working.

Alternatively, a user who is a member of the local Administrators group can enter their credentials instead. In this case, the interactive user is logged off which includes forcefully closing all running applications and the administrator is returned to the standard logon prompt. What the administrator can't normally do is to unlock the computer and start using the interactive user's session.

There may, however, be legitimate scenarios where an administrator needs to do just this. I haven't actually thought of any, but either way, please keep reading. The one thing preventing this tool from wreaking havoc on office LANs everywhere is that the user running the application must be in the local Administrators group on the target machine. This is consistent, of course, with the premise that once you have administrative rights on a machine, you can do pretty much anything you'd like.

An administrator accessing a user's interactive session has never been explicitly forbidden; it's just never been exposed either programmatically or through the UI. So, if we're not really unlocking the workstation then what exactly is happening? To make a long story very short, in Windows there is something called a "desktop".

Now don't think of a desktop as the place where your Recycle Bin and My Computer icons live. It's a more fundamental concept. Think of a "desktop" as a logical container for other Windows There are at least two desktops that exist on your computer at all times: they are named Default and Winlogon.

As you read this, you're looking at the Default desktop. If you'd like to see the Winlogon desktop, just hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete. The Winlogon desktop will become the active, visible desktop, and the Default desktop will be hidden.

The Winlogon desktop is home to the "Windows Security" dialog box that appears when you hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and the "Computer Locked" window that appears when you click the "Lock Computer" button again, see Figure 1. Every other window you're likely to see lives on the Default desktop. By the way, the Winlogon desktop is named for the process winlogon.

It listens for Ctrl-Alt-Delete, asks you for your credentials, authenticates you, and eventually starts up Explorer so that you can actually start using your computer. It then goes back to sleep, quietly waiting for you to hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete again, in which case it activates the Winlogon desktop as described above.

The one thing to take away from this is that when you lock a workstation, your application windows including your desktop icons and task bar are not individually hidden. Rather, the desktop that they live on is hidden and the Winlogon desktop becomes visible. Think of a stack of two index cards: hitting Ctrl-Alt-Delete simply takes the Winlogon desktop from the bottom and places it on the top of the Default desktop. Essentially, this application which I call "RemoteUnlock" bypasses the actual "unlocking" code in the winlogon process and simply switches the visible desktop back to Default.

An interesting side-effect of this is that Windows specifically winlogon still thinks the computer is locked. You can see this when you run RemoteUnlock because while the computer is "unlocked", hitting Ctrl-Alt-Delete does nothing. Because, Ctrl-Alt-Delete is handled by the winlogon process and, as far as it's concerned, the system is still locked.

Since a locked computer should already be showing the Winlogon desktop, the system incorrectly sees no need to activate the Winlogon desktop again. For this reason, RemoteUnlock will "re-lock" the workstation upon termination.

More specifically, it will switch back to the Default desktop. Otherwise, the system would be in some weird limbo-state where Ctrl-Alt-Delete doesn't work as expected. Maybe someday I'll figure out a way to truly unlock the workstation, but for now, this should be sufficient. In Windows, creating a remote service is an easy way to start a process on a remote machine.

Basically, the only way to execute code on a remote machine is to get something already running there to execute it for you. As long as you have the appropriate permissions, the Service Control Manager on the remote machine is happy to launch an executable for you. Easy to follow. No jargon. Pictures helped. Didn't match my screen. Incorrect instructions.

Too technical. Not enough information.