re: Make sure your Security Accounts Manager is running!
Saturday, August 23, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Posted by Raven
(18 messages posted)
I doubt this is really the case (as far as being an excesively common thing, I mean),
I think it is more of a personal issue. The Security Accounts Manager (not the service)
or SAM is a database of user permissions, and everything I have read about the Security
Accounts Manager service says it simply tells programs whether or not they are allowed
to access or modify this database. The SAM stores all your user passwords including,
I believe, BIOS passwords if you have any set (I may possibly be wrong about the
latter part). A disappearing, set-to-autohide, or double-sized taskbar is a common
Windows "magical error," similar to when a program "stops responding" but hasn't
actually stopped responding, or when you drag a file or window and everything behind
the window, sometimes including the desktop itself, has disappeared. A double-sized
taskbar may stay on restart, but an absent taskbar will either magically reappear
30 minutes later, or reappear on restart. The Security Accounts Manager service
itself could not possibly have made your taskbar disappear (or prevented it from
appearing); what I would guess happened is that a program tried to query the process,
which did not respond, and that is what caused the taskbar to disappear (in my experience
this particular "magical error" usually happens when there is not enough system resources
of some kind, which could include an unanswered request or unfinished task). Therefore,
when you enabled the process, it was able to respond if the query was still out there.
If you hadn't restarted your computer before then it's quite obvious that the restart
is what caused your taskbar to reappear, just like it almost always does, otherwise
I would say that while this is worth a shot and this processs should be enabled anyway
due to the errors it can cause if disabled, I don't think that it is any sort of
"universal" or common fix for an absent taskbar that would be something one would
normally post about. I think enabling this process could be a common fix for "frequent,
seemingly-unrelated errors of various types without virus". If this is a normal
fix for an absent taskbar, it probablay had to do with more specific things then
that and will only work for users with a similar setup, which means you'd need to
post more info to be as useful as you'd probably like.
Also, "CTRL SHIFT ESC" does not open the task manager, it opens the process manager.
On XP computers this is actually the same window, but you will not be seeing the
tasks your computer is running by hitting these buttons, unless you select a different
tab. You also did not explain how to enable the service if it is actually disabled
(which would be services.msc, as well as opening explorer you can then naviagte anywhere
including CP).
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