windows 11 24h2, black screen, winlogon

[EnticingEmoji]

Initial issue, Login, Go inactive, screen saver initiates, user input, system initiates secure lock. Sometimes the lock screen will appear some times it wont. Just a blank black screen with no user input. (tried entering in password to unlock even though nothing graphical was present. Attempted to use the graphics reset hot key (win + ctrl + shift+ B) Screen flickers back to black screen.

Checking background processes I can see gphotoshow still running. Trying to terminate it yields an error that it can't be terminated since it doesn't exist. Trying to terminate it along with parent processes yields error. There are 2 processes that gphotoshow is bound to. explorer.exe and winlogon

If its bound to explorer.exe it seems to clean itself up only if the scr file is in a directory with good user permissions. C:\windows (Apparently bad user context) vs C:\windows\system32 (Apparently good user context)

That said, killing the explorer process does not terminate the child process (even when killing gphotoshow explicitly or piped after the parent process is killed.
Though killing winlogon frees up the graphical environment. Probably because it forces log off of all users.

Very painful thing to troubleshoot. Figured I'd put my findings here in case there is an engineer that gets a random insight from this.

All drivers up to date, most current hotfix/cumulative for windows 24h2 has been installed as well. (KB5085516)

[gpb]

Hello,
Unfortunately, from your description, I don't understand the problem. gPhotoShow has nothing to do with Winlogon, the lock screen, or Windows Explorer.
gPhotoShow is a screen saver; it starts when the PC is idle and can be stopped at any time. Even if it freezes, you can use the Ctr-Alt-Del shortcut to switch to the operating system and close it. In no way gPhotoShow can lock your computer.
If gPhotoShow displays a black screen when you start it, it's because the configured directories don't contain viewable files, they're inaccessible, or they contain too many files and the program is busy scanning.