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I ran without a screensaver for a long time, but recently I enabled one. I set the delay to 10 minutes, but this setting will not hold. It keeps changing to 1 minute.

I am able to apply the 10 minute setting, and I can close and open the Properties dialog and see that the setting is 10 minutes. However, every day at some point I notice that the screensaver comes on after only a minute of inactivity, and when I check the setting it is back to "Wait 1 minutes."

  • I have done a virus and malware scan, and found nothing.

  • I tried a different display driver revision, just in case it might help.

What could be causing this?

Can the screensaver itself change this setting?

Is it possible to "lock" the setting so that programs cannot change it?

I used Process Monitor as recommended, and I found an instance of the setting being changed from 600 to 60 (seconds). The process command was:

"C:\WINDOWS\system32\rundll32.exe" /d C:\WINDOWS\system32\shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL desk.cpl

The only thing I did with desk.cpl during the monitored time was was to turn on and off a second display. This apparently does not happen every time I do this, or it would have happened sooner.

Again, what's causing this, and how do I stop it?

Heptite is also experiencing this problem. He is using Windows 7 (Ultimate, 64-bit) on a laptop.

"Mine was resetting from a value higher than 10 to exactly 10 minutes for a while, but now it's resetting to 1 minute like you're experiencing."

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Are you on a domain with a group policy? – ChrisF Apr 11 '11 at 9:43
@ChrisF this is on my personal machine. I don't recall setting up something like this but anything is possible. How do I check for what you're thinking of? – Mr.Wizard Apr 11 '11 at 9:58
I think you'd remember if you'd set up a domain ;) I'm not on XP at the moment so I can't double check the option you need. – ChrisF Apr 11 '11 at 10:24
I'm seeing mine reset to 10 minutes from any value greater than 10 minutes. Have you been able to discover what's happening? – Heptite Apr 24 '11 at 19:42
I monitored it for a while and saw several more instances of the change as recorded above, but I have not found a way to stop it from happening. Please let me know if you do! – Mr.Wizard Apr 24 '11 at 23:59
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2 Answers

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Open ProcMon and watch for any Registry operation where Path contains ScreenSaveTimeOut.

You can exclude read operations such as RegOpenKey or RegQueryValue, and only look for writes.

(Edit: fixed value name)

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I wasn't getting the right stuff at first, but it appears the key name is ScreenSaveTimeOut. I shall monitor that and see if I learn anything. – Mr.Wizard Apr 11 '11 at 7:27
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up vote 0 down vote

The next step is to go back to Process Monitor and figure out what's launching that rundll32 command.

Filter for Operation Process Create and Path c:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe. That should tell you what process in your system is kicking off the offending setting change.

Once you know which process is at fault, you can take 'corrective action' against the offending program.

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I have been trying to trace this, but I'm having two problems. First is that I have not been able to properly set up procmon to show me the registry operations for ScreenSaveTimeOut for some reason (probably PEBKAC), which I need to do to verify that my system is getting the setting changed in the same way that @Mr.Wizard's is. The second is that lately I have not been able to reproduce the problem, at all. – Heptite May 6 '11 at 7:03
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