Computer locks itself after 20 seconds

Question

So a computer we have locks itself after 20 seconds unless you perform some action. It also locks itself if your in registry or windows task scheduler or services directly its like its not registering any actions in those windows. But as soon as i click on the desktop for example the sleep/lock stops dead in its track but only for a short while.

I have tried enabling certain Power Options via regedit for example System unattended sleep timeout to 60 minutes but it has made no difference i have no idea what do do now.

Answer 1

The fact that it doesn't detect activity in those specific programs seems to hint that the cause of this behaviour is a program (i.e. malware) running with user-level privileges. It cannot get a handle on elevated programs that run with admin privileges.

I suspect that restarting Windows in Safe Mode will result in the behaviour going away, which will give you time to do a more thorough check of the services, start-up folder, etc. I'd also recommend running a few anti-malware programs which might pick up such a tool.