The user profile service failed the logon error fix

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

We recently had an issue where a Domain Controller was giving us this error when we were trying to remote (RDP) on to it:

The user profile service failed the logon. no more threads can be created in the system

The server itself was on a different site to us many miles away (different country!) so we could not simply go and take a look at it. Also, it was not our virtual backup Domain Controller it was our main physical Domain Controller on site so we could not even use VMWare to reboot the server.

So, we started reading many helpful guides on the internet about editing registry keys etc, all very nice, but we would still need to reboot the machine which we could not do.

Eventually, we decided that sod it, we just need to get this server rebooted so we started looking into this and the simplest way we found to do this is the advanced shut down tool. To use this tool, you can either purchase our Ultimate Settings Panel Pro (shameful plug!) or run the following command on any machine on your network:

shutdown /i

This will bring up a dialog box that should look like this:

From here you can click the Add button and then browse for the machines on your network that you want to reboot, in our case, the faulty Domain Controller. Then fill out the rest of the box and when you are ready, click the OK button.

This will send a remote shutdown/reboot command to the machines that you have added and reboot them immediately.

We did this and after a few minutes we tried to remote back on to the Domain Controller and there you go! all working again without any messing about with the registry edits! sometimes the simple “have you tried turning it off and on again” is the best!