Not sure if this type of question is appropriate for this forum, but I've tried everything I can think of to solve this problem aside from format/reinstall.

I recently got a new work PC (Dell optiplex 755) with windows 7 professional x64. Standard developer software installed for .net development: VS2008, VS2005, SQL management studio, office 2007, etc.

Recently I've been having this weird problem where after I lock my pc, when I try to unlock it, the screen will be black for awhile after unlocking. I can ctl+alt+del and put my password in but then it just goes black. The amount of time on the black screen seems to be related to the amount of time I am away from my PC. If only away a few minutes, it'll take about a minute to get to the desktop. If away for an hour, could take up to 15 minutes. If I lock it and go home for the night, I have to restart my PC in the morning (I've let it sit for an hour after a night of being locked and nothing happened). It doesn't do it every time but definitely the majority of the time.

One weird thing I've seen is that if I remote into my machine before trying to log back in it does not do it. I uninstalled all software back to the point when I remember it started happening and it still does it. I was using this PC for a few weeks without this problem happening at all.

Anyone know what my next troubleshooting steps could be? My IT department tried to fix it by moving my old profile to another disk and having me log in, effectively recreating a profile from scratch but that didn't solve it.

As I said above if this isn't the right forum for these types of questions please let me know. Thanks in advance!