Every so often I will run into the error where a Windows 2003 server will get stuck logging off a user. The console screen will display the message “Saving your settings”.

I ran into this issue while needing to remotely reboot a server. The server in question did not have any kind of remote access card. However, the server was running RAdmin software and I was able to get a console screen open. Both shutdown and psshutdown commands failed to run. Running “query session” and “query user” didn’t give me any active sessions to reset.

Ultimately I used pskill to kill the winlogon.exe process. Once the process was killed I was able to log on via console and/or RDP.