I won't be back on-site to try the "backup.exe" rename trick until tomorrow, but I'm eager to see if it would work.



We had multiple machines BSoD'ing right in the middle of users using them (actually saw one happen face-to-face) yesterday.



I'd be really interested to hear what the root cause is. We did enough troubleshooting to see that a machine exhibits the issue even when disconnected from the network. Since we have hundreds of machines that aren't going to be powered-on again until August it would be comforting to know if there's anything to be done before we bring them up. (We have disconnected our Avast server VM from the network pre-emptively, just to see if that helped. It didn't fix machines that were already "looping" and it appears that some more failed during the time the Avast server was disconnected.)



Because our machines aren't making it through Group Policy application we've been unable to come up with an automated solution to resolve the machines that are "looping". The PCs return a few PINGs while they're coming up before they blue-screen. If the renaming "backup.exe" works I might try to write a little tool that repeatedly attempts to connect via File and Print Sharing to a remote machine and rename "backup.exe". If there's enough time to catch them while booting before they blue screen that would save a lot of time. That's certainly preferable to traveling out to the various buildings and walking room-to-room looking for looping machines. (I should be able to find the looping machines easily enough-- they'll be the ones generating DHCP discover packets every 2 - 3 minutes.)