My windows 8 is randomly logging off on its own, bug?

Good news and bad news!

I upgraded to 8.1 about 2 weeks ago now. I thought at FIRST things seemed maybe smoother and that the problem was fixed in 8.1 now - I actually had a funny 'blackout' instance early on which DIDN'T automatically reboot me to the logon screen again, and I thought 'AHHH THIS IS IT, THEY 'FIXED' IT!!!!!' (although, no matter waiting for 2 hours and trying all the Ctrl+Alt+Del's and Ctrl+Shift+Esc's that I could, it still being effectively no better anyway since i had to hard power off in the end anyway), but sadly, this was to be proven wrong in time. sadly, I've had a couple of these 'reboots' now, despite having 8.1.

HOWEVER - I have some good/helpful news. I noticed something with the instance that happened just now, that may shed some light onto what the cause of the problem is. (my instance of it anyway.)

during the epileptic fit black screen/screen flashing moment, this time I noticed, right before the final 'reboot' (about halfway through the epileptic fit), I noticed a windows it was flashing (not the one I had open when it happened, one buried in about 6 windows underneath my current one), what it 'flashed' was the screen in 'non-resized' DPI scaling resolution: in real resolution rather than my windows-set 150%? default system-wide DPI scaling size. (See I have a 2012 retina Macbook Pro, so need DPI scaling turned on.)

SO, I think it is some sort of dpi/resolution/scaling problem, or maybe some sort of bootcamp video driver complicated issue (although as already mentioned I DID recently update to the latest laptopvideo2go.com driver version, wonderfully smoothly I must say), but DEFINITELY some sort of video card/screen issue.

I do see that I have no chance to try using the MBP's Intel HD Graphics 4000, and I'm stuck with the NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M as my video card, so can't test that variable. (If it's a well-functioning driver that shouldn't be the problem anyway.)

And also, another detail: the window that I noticed 'flashing' in non dpi-scaled resolution, was a program called 'Registry Workshop' - and I happen to know, that this program operates (I'm pretty sure), in Administrator mode - cos a hotkey I setup with AutoHotKey never works with it and I know this is cos AHK doesn't operate in Admin mode (unless I set it to, but I don't as I would have to set all proggies to always run in admin mode to then make my admin'ed AHK work with all of them). I wonder whether admin programs, with the DPI scaling, have some significance in causing the issue? HMMMM.....

So anyway, with this new observation I wonder: is the 'epileptic' black screen/flashing event, Windows having an issue with DPI scaling? Something (memory, admin mode programs) interacts with the DPI scaling setting, suddenly making it switch back and forth between the two scaled modes as if it doesn't know which one it's supposed to be, then subsequently crashing (in a way that forces user logoff), as a result?

If you are running a lot of programs in Windows 8(8.1) and you start hitting GDI limits, system prohibits any new input from the user until it has closed the session with a logoff and then asks the user to log in again.

You can reproduce this with the following batch file(requires Sysinternals Testlimit).

:loop

start testlimit64.exe -g 1024

timeout 1

goto loop

This is also happening to me, but i've found the application causing this: Foxit PDF reader.

Not always, but sometimes, when i open a PDF with that application, the screen goes black, then flickers a bit, and then shows the logon screen: i've been logged off.

Same with Windows 8 and 8.1!

On Fri, 3 Jan 2014 10:36:54 +0000, Phoenix2000 wrote:

This is also happening to me, but i've found the application causing this: Foxit PDF reader.
Not always, but sometimes, when i open a PDF with that application, the screen goes black, then flickers a bit, and then shows the logon screen: i've been logged off.

Same with Windows 8 and 8.1! 

Just a quick comment: I've been using Foxit Reader for years, and I've
never seen such behavior from it. Something else is wrong on your
system.

This is a glitch that just goes on and on and on....with no consistent answer in sight. This started with me after a few months with a new PC and NOTHING I did worked.  Best advice I got from this forum was to switch to Windows 7 and that is what I did.