Windows account locking issues can occur for a number of reasons, but whatever the cause its annoying and pinpointing the issue can be difficult.

Windows lockout issues mostly happen to computers on a corporate network or domain when a policy is implemented to lockout an account usually after 3 wrong login attempts as a security measure.

Causes and solutions of a Windows account locking

Has the accounts password been changed recently?

Or did the problem begin after the password was changed?

Does the same user account login to more than one computer? Very often the issue can occur if a computer is attempting to connect using an old password. Any device which authenticates through a domain can cause this issue; this can include smart phones which may sync remotely with an Exchange/Email server.

Processes or Services
Does your computer or any other login to any network resources using remembered username and password credentials, you can check this from running services.msc from the Start – Run menu, also check to make sure there are no drive mappings using persistent connections with alternative login credentials.

A local issue
The easiest way to check if the account lockout issue is local is to recreate the users profile, the easiest way to perform this is to restart the computer (it has to be restarted and not simply logged off of the user profile will still be locked) login using another account with Administrator rights and now go to c:\\\\documents and Settings and rename the original user profile giving it an old extension – now log back in the as the user having the issue and the profile will be recreated, so you can test again.

If all works next copy over files from My Documents – Favorites – Desktop, if the account is still locking simply log back in using the other account with Admin rights and name the profile back, removing the old extension, now log back in as the original user and everything will be as it was before.

So now it is beginning to look as though it is not a local problem, as a final test download the Account Lockout and Management Tools downloadable from Microsoft and run ALockout.dll on your pc this will check any applications of processes that is using the wrong credentials.

Note
Do not use any servers that host applications

So now we have ascertained that the problem is not local and this points towards an Active Directory replication issue – the next step is to run LockoutStatus.exe which is part of – Account Lockout and Management Tools – this will provide details of the domain controller(s) from which the account is being locked.

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