I am very frustrated by this problem.
About 6 computers and 1 laptop forcefully restarts with no warning on our network at least once a week. We have a about 150 computers on our network. The restart usually happens every Thursday morning after the user has logged in and started working. Always the same user/computer. Three of the computers are in the same department.
About our system/network:
- Windows 2003 servers.
- Windows XP service pack 3 computers and laptops.
- In Group Policy I have had Windows updates disabled long before this problem started.
- Users do not have admin rights
- Sophos Anti Virus (updates automatically every morning)
What I have tried:
- 1st thought was that Sophos Anti Virus restarts the computer after it does its updates every morning. Sophos support assured me that their software does not ever force a pc to restart.
- I had a software roll-out configured via Group Policy for Adobe Flash(which I could not get working). I thought this might have caused the restarts, I disabled this.
- I checked that the Windows Updates Group policy was working on these computers.
- In the department of three computers we had a computer upgrade and I thought that this would be the day I can get rid of this problem. After the upgrade the restart happened as usual.