The other day, when my PC became unbearably slow, I decided to press the Ctrl+Alt+Del command. The plan was to bring up the Task Manager and check which process was killing my CPU.
Unfortunately, my plan didn’t work.
Failure to display security and shut down options.
When I used the Ctrl+Alt+Del command, my screen went blank for a couple of seconds. After that, the following error message appeared:
The message in question:
Failure to display security and shut down options. The logon process was unable to display security and logon options when CTRL+ALT+DELETE was pressed. If the operating system does not respond, press ESC or restart the computer by using the power switch.
Basically, my CPU usage was so high that my computer was unable to bring up the CTRL+ALT+DELETE menu.
Unfortunately, there is not much that you can do when this error appears. Whenever I have come across this error, I’ve had to remain patient and wait until the CPU usage has dropped.
If the problem does continue, then you might want to hold down the power button on your PC for a couple of seconds. Note that if you do this, you will lose any unsaved work. You also run the risk of corrupting whatever data is being written to disk. In unfortunate cases, this might corrupt your hard drive and lead to startup issues.
Note that in my case, the CPU usage was high because of spoolsv.exe.