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Black Login Screen on Windows Server

Does the following screen look familiar?

BlackLoginScreen

We recently received the above login screen when trying to connect to one of our servers. Not exactly an error or a problem if you can find your way through the User name, Password, and Log on to fields, but still annoying.

According to Microsoft, this issue occurs if all the values under the registry subkey HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Colors are set to “0 0 0”. Here’s a snap shot of what the registry key looked like on our server:

Registry Screen Control Panel Colors

In our case the root cause was the C:\ drive running out of disk space as a result of a script that created daily log files. To fix the problem, I ran the attached file called FixColor (You’ll need to unzip the file in order to import the FixColor registry settings). The file is essentially an export of the HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Colors registry branch from a server where the login screen works as expected.

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