I have a small 2008 domain with a mix of windows 7 and xp clients. I made a change to a group policy for security which caused about 20 workstations to boot to a black screen with just a cursor. I wound up having to boot each one into recovery mode, could not even get into safe mode. I believe it was caused by one of the following group policy changes I made about 20 minutes prior to the problem appearing:
Computer/Policies/Windows Settings/Security Settings/Local Policies/Security Options
Interactive logon: Number of previous logons to cache
Set to 0
Do not allow anonmyous enumeration of SAM accounts
Enabled
Do not allow anonmyous enumeration of SAM accounts
Enabled
Do not allow storage of passwords and credentials for network authentication
Enabled
Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> System Services
RPC disabled
Remote Registry disabled
Its the RPC service that has me most suspicious though I still don't understand how it would cause the black screen and then only for a portion of our Windows 7 PCs. XP was not affected at all. There was one oddity that stands out which I'd like to mention. I opened a backup of the policy I changed on Friday and examined the settings. There is a security button for the RPC and Remote Registry services. When I clicked this to examine the settings it was blank where most of the other services show System (full), Administrators (full), and Interactive (read). Could this have been the cause of the problem? I'd like to enable the policy again but without knowing exactly what happened I can't really take the change. I'd very much appreciate any ideas for this problem, thanks!
Dan