Windows 10 Logs out automatically ( all sleep/logout settings off)

Hi There,

As the title implies, windows 10 automatically logs out. and I cant figure out why.
This started happening in the last 2 weeks after a windows update.

-I dont know exactly How long before it logs out but i assume more than 20-30 minutes of inactivity.

-It's not THAT annoying because it only happens overnight , normally. BUt i'd still like to know why its logging out.

I'm trying to find the one setting that's making this happen. I cant find it.


-I've looked at all sleep and power settings. Everything is is set to NEVER in windows 10 settings.

-in power options turn off display / put computer to sleep is set to never.

-in advance power settings all sleep settings are set to NEVER ie: sleep , hybrid sleep, hibernate etc.. all set to Never.

- I know about the System unattended sleep timeout. I did the whole regedit thing to show that setting in power settings. It was Set to 2 minute. I've change it to something ALOT longer like 100000000 minutes But it still logs out.

-screensaver is turned off. and all checkboxes in screensave are off..

-It's not a reboot or a BSOD because all apps and everything are exactly the same when I log back in

-system restore / reinstall is out of the question right now. I dont think my computer is setup to do system restores anyways. and a reinstall is out of the question because i dont have time to figure out / download windows ( i've lost my windows disk/ usb drive , cant afford the time to reinstall all my work apps etc.. etc... )


Not a super emergency but its driving me nuts that i cant figure out how to just completely Turn off windows 10 from logging out automatically.

Thanks for any help

I know this thread is a bit long in the tooth but the OP's complaint is exactly what I am seeing. I have a Surface Pro 4 with Win 10 ver 1803. It used to be that I could just leave it sitting around for days on end if I wanted to without having to log in or anything.

At some point I became sensitive to that and enabled the power settings to turn the screen off after 1 hour of inactivity and put the system to sleep after 4 hours of inactivity. That was fine, but recently I've been trying to run some tests that need to run overnight or longer (I'm a software developer). 3 of the 4 machines I'm running this test on are using Windows 7 and run all night without logging out. The Surface Pro logs out after what I'm guessing is roughly 2 hours of inactivity. It shuts down my application, terminating the test on that machine. This has been very frustrating.

One of the test machines has a notification in the application I'm testing that says the Surface Pro disconnected at 1:14:03 in the morning, having last come online at 22:44:06. That's where I'm getting the 2 hour guess from. The time it came online is not necessarily the last time I would have interacted with it, but it probably wasn't long after that.

I'm pretty savvy and I have access to geeks I work with that are even more savvy about group policies, etc., and we are stumped by this. There has to be something that explains what is going on. Thanks for any help anyone might have.

The problem went away without explanation. It is possible that I restarted the Surface Pro after making the previous post and that since that time it hasn't logged out after a period of inactivity, but I honestly can't remember for sure now. There's no obvious correlation between restarting it and getting the asked-for behavior from the settings but who knows.

To anyone else who runs across this problem that would be my recommendation: Restart the machine.