Login stuck in a loop

[Locc]

I am new to this forum and hope you people can help me. I start my Mac and everything is fine until I enter my password to log in. It accepts my password and for a few seconds it appears as if it's loading but then it just jumps back to the log in screen.

The only thing I can think of is that it has something to do with me using the program Parallels to install a copy of Windows XP. This issue happened as soon as I rebooted after installing Windows XP on Parallels. A very important detail is that I got a kernel panic as soon as I started Windows XP in Parallels for the first time. I should also note that I had Parallels with a copy of Windows 7 a long time all ready and never had any problems with it.

I restarted my Lion in verbose mode and there are no messages in between the loading of the log in screens. When I shut down I do see some Parallels messages but nothing alarming. I decided to remove Parallels from my Lion using the installer's Terminal. Now I no longer get any messages in verbose mode about Parallels when I restart my Mac but the problem remains.

I hope someone can help me. I am not even sure Parallels caused this but it seems likely as it happened right after the kernel panic it caused.

 

[jasonvp]

I am new to this forum and hope you people can help me. I start my Mac and everything is fine until I enter my password to log in. It accepts my password and for a few seconds it appears as if it's loading but then it just jumps back to the log in screen.

Was this a fresh install of Lion? Did you recently install MS Office 2011, by chance? I've seen this exact thing on quite a few new Lion installs after MS Office is installed. Somehow, Office is able to munge the authentication subsystem of OS X. The only fix I've seen is re-installing Lion on top of itself without re-formatting.

There may be other less-sledgehammer-like solutions, but I haven't figured them out.

jas

 

[Locc]

How safe is simply reinstalling Lion over itself? Do I need to back anything up? The answer to your question is no, I have had Office 2008 since I first got this Lion a little after Lion came out.

 

[jasonvp]

How safe is simply reinstalling Lion over itself? Do I need to back anything up? The answer to your question is no, I have had Office 2008 since I first got this Lion a little after Lion came out.

It's perfectly safe to do it assuming you DO NOT use the Disk Utility to reformat the target drive. All of your apps, user settings, etc will be right where you left them after the install.

I've done it too many times to count.

jas

 

[Locc]

Thanks! It's all better now. I actually sort of knew you could install Lion again like that but never tried it because it just sounds so risky, for some reason.