I am running XP pro SP3 This problem presented itself yesterday on a limited account (here on LA), entering the login details produces the message "userinit.exe the application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000022)" Click on OK to terminate the application. Not clicking isn't really an option. If I click OK then the desktop background image loads but no taskbar or icons. Ctrl-Alt-Del brings up the Task Manager and sure enough explorer.exe is not running. Going to File:NewTask and trying to launch explorer.exe from there brings up the same error message but with explorer.exe in place of userinit.exe "explorer.exe the application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000022)". I can log out though. Logging in as an administrator account works AVG free full scan found nothing. I tried creating a new limited user (LU2) and logging in as LU2 - "userinit.exe the application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000022)" I then tried creating a new administrator account - this logged in just fine. I then tried changing LU into an administrator instead of a limited user - login worked. I then moved LU back to a limited account - "userinit.exe the application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000022)" so the problem seems to be related to user permissions. I have had a look at userinit.exe and administrators have full control while power users and users both have read + read & execute permissions. As a test I left LU as limited and set the security permissions for userinit.exe to full control for everyone and tried logging in - "userinit.exe the application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000022)". I applied a series of MS updates on 16th oct 09: kb971486 kb958869 kb974571 kb969059 kb974112 kb975025 kb975467 kb973525 kb975254 As far as I can tell none of these relate to userinit.exe and rolling back to an earlier restore point does not change the behaviour on login for LU. So I have restored the security permissions for userinit.exe. I've tried searching the kb and googling but the information I find all relates to a fixed malware infection that has left the registry entry HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Userinit pointing somewhere other than C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe This is not my problem. If anyone has any suggestions as to causes or fixes then I would be happy to hear them. In the mean time I have moved the limitted user over to a linux account until she can have a limited account on XP (or can be trusted with admin rights).4 people need an answerI do too