Availability Anywhere Part 4 — Fixing LogonUi hang

This is the fourth part of the Availability Anywhere series. For your convenience you can find other parts in the table of contents in Part 1 – Connecting to SSH tunnel automatically in Windows

Sometimes when I RDP into other machine and forget to close the connection gently (I put my client to sleep or my VPN gets terminated), I cannot log into the machine anymore. It hangs on the login screen with picture like this:

I can log into the machine using RemoteApp Terminal Services, SSH into it or connect over PS Remoting but I cannot log into existing session opened via RDP previously.

The reason for that is LogonUi.exe process which hangs. I believe this has something to do with HP fingerprint reader but I didn’t confirm that.

So what to do in case of an error like this? Simply open another session using RemoteApp TS and run CMD (or SSH/PS Remote into the machine) and try killing the process with

Then you should be able to log into the session again. Obviously, this requires some alternative connection to the machine but this was covered in last weeks.