Can't change lock screen on windows 8.1

......... choose a lock screen picture you have not used before.  You should see that in the Lock Screen when you lock your screen.  Now, go back in and choose pictures at random, over and over again for a few minutes.  It took a couple of days for some odd reason before full functionality returned, including previewing the past five choices, but that might just be because I did not have time to play around with it for a bit yesterday before full functionality returned after playing around with it today.

Well, this might fixed your problem but the resolution seems to be a matter of chance. Coz I tried every possible solution several times. At the end, yesterday, i decided to create new user. i will not describe the solution in details but hope everything will be clear enough. 

If you have your current account linked with live accounts then turn on Sync your settings from Change PC Settings - OneDrive (former SkyDrive) - Sync Settings.

Then I disconnected Live account which led to creation of local account. (Change PC settings - Accounts - your account)

Then logged in as administrator and added new account with Live email address (Change PC settings - Accounts - Other accounts - Add an account)

Logged out from administrator account and logged in with new account. (you will still have local account available)

Because it is first time you log in to that accounts windows will take some time to set everything up. once everything is set you should see same start menu as you had before, thanks to the Sync settings option. However apps you purchased and downloaded from windows store will have to be installed again. 

After that copied all my docs, pics, musics, and desktop files from local (old) account to new live account and deleted the local one.

By doing so I avoided to do system restore moreover this fixed problem with flash player not working for particular web sites.

Hi Charles,

Thank you for sharing the resolution with us which will help others facing the same problems to fix it.

What did you need to restore SYSTEM access to?

Hmmm.  I thought I replied to this but I appear to have been wrong.  Either that or it must have been somewhere else.  Anyway, it was everything in the following folder:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Systemdata

Once I added the SYSTEM user I was able to set the lock screen picture again.  Unfortunately, deleting a couple folders out of that folder in order to try another approach before this one also made it no longer function correctly.  It no longer will show the last five selections and any picture that had been set prior to the updates now cannot be selected again without renaming them.  Running sfc /scannow shows no problems or integrity violations.

I've tried restoring SYSTEM access to this folder, given myself access, given administrators access. I've tried renaming this folder to rebuild it. I've tried the various registry fixes people say. I've tried refreshing my device. None of this works, lock screen select screen is still blank and has the spinning circle when you try change it like you posted an image of.

I'm running 8.1 Update 1 on a Surface 2. This is really starting to bug me now, something so simple seems like an impossible thing to fix and I'm a huge techie. I can't imagine what the average user would be like trying to solve this.

I have noticed this folder is read only, and attempting to change that just produces an error.

CTyldsley

I did all available solutions to no avail. still unable to change lock screen.

but I guess the problem is with a live account linked in. coz changing the lock screen for an administrator account works great.

hope someone will finally find a solution for this.

As mentioned above, I have been able to set the lock screen picture since doing what I did above.  I have not been able to see the five options available after selecting pictures since doing that, however, because of something else I did that did not work.

I just did the "rename folder" solution yesterday to see what it would do, if anything.  Full functionality has now been restored the day after I tried it.  Here is what I see now:

What I had to do was to use the Advanced button in the Security tab in the Properties dialog and take ownership of the C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\SystemData folder (you must be logged on as an administrative user to be able to do this and I gave ownership to the Administrators group).  Make sure that you also check the option to "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects."  Click Apply.  As soon as that is done, rename the SystemData folder to SystemDataOld.

After a few moments, a new SystemData folder will be created.  After that, choose a lock screen picture you have not used before.  You should see that in the Lock Screen when you lock your screen.  Now, go back in and choose pictures at random, over and over again for a few minutes.  It took a couple of days for some odd reason before full functionality returned, including previewing the past five choices, but that might just be because I did not have time to play around with it for a bit yesterday before full functionality returned after playing around with it today.

Hi Charles,

I apologize for the inconvenience.

If you need any further assistance with Windows Operating System, please post your query on Microsoft Community Forums and we’ll be glad to assist you with it.

I didn't think the system reset would work: this is weird private data that would be covered oddly by any resets.  I saw somebody else manually delete those Lock Screen folders and got it to reset upon the recreation... that might be a better path to solution.

I'd like to get to the bottom of this and fix it.  I would need physical access to a machine in this state and want to put it under a kernel debugger and go from there.  Besides that, actual support (I'm a developer, not part of support) would need to do about that equivalent.  It's probably not an easy thing to diagnose abstractly, as has been noticed.  People still hitting this that need answers probably need to turn to actual product support.  I don't know if actual deep product support is available on this forum.

The permissions on that directory are very serious and not generally meant to be ever be tampered with by a user because it's in a more secure zone (the lock screen).  This is by design. Those locked down permissions were apparently corrupted in some fashion on your system.  Having the system be more resilient to that corruption would be excellent, but since I for one don't have a full understanding of your system state it would be hard to know how to recover from that if applicable.  Either bashing it yourself or getting it into the hands of actual support are probably the best way to move forward here. :\

If my system were still in that state, I would not mind doing that.

Microsoft developers and support personnel do read these threads from time to time.

The trouble with the current configuration in security made it impossible for the system to change the lock screen settings for the lock screen or even see what is already there when the problem occurs.  I don't understand the logic in giving system rights to only TrustedInstaller and preventing SYSTEM from accessing folder contents.