Vista - difficulties with password box appearing from logon splash

So...Hello Forum,

I'm having a glitch I've never seen or heard about.

Computer seems to boot normally, but regardless of safe mode or normal mode choices, when you are presented with the icons and names for your choice of logons, when you click any of those icons (the power and ease of access buttons exhibit same behavior) you get almost nothing. You definitely do not get a white window for the password to be entered into.

What you do get is odd. The first user icon or button you click, the first time you click it, it gets lighter in shade. Then the next time you click it or any other icon or button it stays the normal shade, but there is a slight dotted box around it (selected, almost).

I have figured out I can make the password box appear by TABing so that the first user icon on the left is selected with the slight dotted box, and then arrow keying to the account I wish to log in with, and then hitting enter. Usual keyboard behavior.

No amount of mousing and entering will make the box appear prior to the above.

Once I have made the password box appear, it will always appear. I can log in, log out, log in window-L to other accounts no problem.

The only somewhat recent change software wise was to NVidia beta drivers. After SP1 gaming performance was tanking, and I thought I'd try the beta drivers. They were buggy and hung the system a lot, but when they did work, they worked great.

The password box behavior followed one of these system hangs.

I have since tried the WHQL driver, as well as other beta drivers with no change in the bad behavior.

Freaky behavior with no experience always makes me run a full virus scan, AVG free found nothing, windows defender found nothing, clamwin found nothing, and Panda online found...a bunch of cookies.

I've tried enabling and disabling the control alt del logon requirement. System isn't overheating.

I've stripped it down to one video card another mouse and keyboard. It is a 680sli motherboard, so most of the peripherals are onboard. I don't get the feeling it is a hardware issue.

When I feel I have most successfully removed the NVidia drivers, and the logon screen is the atrocious low resolution, the bad behavior is still there.

I'm not even sure what the proper terminology for the password box is, is it an edit box? searching for anything logon related invariably gets you posts on how to remove your password...

Have you tried using a PS/2 mouse to see if your USB mouse driver got inadvertantly corrupted?

Oh, and one other thing to try: Use the right-click where you would left click. Stupid as this sounds, I wonder if somehow those got inverted and it thinks you're using a left-handed mouse.

Inside Vista, open up an administrative cmd window and type sfc /scannow. That might help.

It also might be related to BIOS. Have you done anything with that lately?

first just to answer to be polite, nothing new with the BIOS and I didn't try a PS2 mouse.

However..
I went with my feeling it was SP1 and NVidia drivers and scoured out the installed drivers, and installed the last best version I'd used.

My password boxes now appear!

Unfortunately I've traded that problem (if you believe the causality) for another set which involve the NVidia control panel.

Hey, no worries. I'm glad you got it sorted out. Hopefully the other problem will be solved as simply.

Good luck, and welcome to the forums.