I had that sinking feeling today, when I fired up my laptop and it sat on a black screen for longer than normal.
Then the ominous mystery dialog appeared:
Blurry ’cause it’s a cell-phone snap . . .
"Logon process failed to create the security options dialog"
Failure: Security Options
Uh-Oh
Hmm. What could have happened recently? My laptop was working on the train this morning. All I was doing was importing a 39 Million row fact table to a Dev database on the train (doesn’t everybody do that?). My laptop did BSOD towards the end . . .
My first assumption was that I had filled up the hard drive, although I did check free space and estimated consumption indicated that filling up the hard drive was unlikely.
My second hypothesis was that SQL was doing what it was trained to do "protect the data, and the integrity of any transacations". It turned out that SQL was starting up and going into a database recovery routine that was starving the console for resources.
Since this was just a test db, I was able to stop SQL Server, drop the database, and rebuild it.
Moral of the story: If I ask my laptop to act like a server, it will.
Object lesson: I set all my services to Manual,
and start them with a CMD file when necessary.
