logon method not allowed suddenly

mayhemsci · 16 Jul 2010

Hi all, am a school teacher and my school is trialling 1:1 computing with some students. Essentially, classmate pcs from intel with windows 7 enterprise. Yesterday at about the same time, all the students find that they cannot log into their classmate pcs, with the error "You cannot log on because the logon method you are using is not allowed on this computer. Please see you network administrator for more details."

Now this is very strange - the students have been using their machines for about 2 months to date without any error. How and why did they suddenly act up, altogether?

I took a machine that has not been issued out, and found that I could log in. Then I found that it is not connected to our wireless as we changed our password a few weeks back. So I keyed in the password, got connected, and logged off and log in again - this time it shows the error. At first I thought it could be a windows update messing things up, but this small experiment indicates that this is not likely as the wireless was connected only for a minute at most before i logged off. We did not change any group policies.

I also found that local accounts cannot work either. The only accounts working are network and local admins.

Any ideas?

A Guy · 16 Jul 2010

Welcome to Seven Forums mayhemsci. Have any changes been made recently? Firewall or security? Are you the admin locally, or is there a system admin who may have changed something?

Assuming you are the admin, even though you said you hadn't changed anything, confirm Group Policy settings:

Start> In the search box type

gpedit.msc

and hit enter

Accept any elevation dialog

Expand Windows Settings> Security Settings> Local Policies> Click on User Rights Assignment

Make sure that Deny log on locally is empty

Make sure that Allow log on locally includes Administrators, Backup
Operators, Guests, and Users

It's possibly that Users is missing from Allow log on locally

A Domain Policy may be overriding the Local Policy if you are not the local admin

A Guy

Lordbob75 · 16 Jul 2010

This is definitely something that the network admin has changed, whether it be a system setting or user setting, but he needs to change it back.

~Lordbob

mayhemsci · 18 Jul 2010

Hi, we did not change the group policies at all these few days. Following your directions, we have found the "Deny Logon Locally Policy" and it is empty. When we try to change it, the "Add User or Group" button is greyed out. The users are all added in the "Allow Logon Locally" policy.

Any other leads? This happened suddenly last Friday after 10am in the morning. At first we thought it only affected clients on Windows 7 (our server is 2003), but later complaints from XP clients came in. We can solve this for teachers by adding them as local administrators, but we cannot do this for students.

Lordbob75 · 19 Jul 2010

Something has to have changed. Since you know the time, you have to look to see if anything in between the time you last used them and 10am the next day has changed.

~Lordbob

Bill2 · 19 Jul 2010

What firewall do you have in place? Check its config or try disabling it.

jkraynak1 · 01 May 2012

Im having same problem only i am the computer administrator and can not log on. its giving me this error. Also none of the other user icons are on the logon screen. please help