cluberti

I hate to ask, but did you move the Program Files or Windows folders somewhere other than %systemdrive%?

The only caveat is that if you truly want them to be mirrors of each other, you need to make sure they both hold the global catalog.

I think you've already figured it out, and perhaps don't know it yet. Let me strip your post down to the salient bits: If the router wasn't working, the Intel card would fail to the router in the same way. There's a reason those Dynex cards are cheap... Get a real WiFi card for the desktop and you'll probably have no problems - I'm guessing your neighbor's router is more forgiving of the Dynex card than yours (for whatever reason), whereas the Intel card is likely better manufactured, the drivers will be better, and as such it works better.

Well, configuring the firewall to allow port 80 traffic to/from the machine in the DMZ's IP address would do the trick. He may have to put the WSUS server's name in the HOSTS file if DNS lookups will fail from the DMZ, but otherwise you only need port 80 (or 443, if you configured WSUS to use SSL).

When you map a drive, you should really use the command prompt and the net use comand, something like "net use \\computername\sharename /user:domain\username". That'll prompt for a password for "domain\username", and then things will work once the password is provided. If you map a drive using the GUI, you'll end up using the current logged-on user's rights, which won't work.

If the folder is on a share, modify the NTFS security permissions so that only administrators and system have access to the folder itself, and make sure the share permissions on the folder are Everyone > Full Control. If you're on a machine where the end-user is logged on, however, you'll need to map a drive to the server and share and use the admin creds though, as otherwise the box will try to access the server with the creds of the currently-logged on (non admin) user.

Because being all things to all people means you have to make compromises. Besides, the bulk of the money Windows brings in are desktop workstation installs and then servers, THEN gamers. So don't count on any changes.

I'd create them only on machines you'll actually be testing on.

Well, if you boot from that Windows XP disc and choose to do a repair install and boot to the recovery console, is there a file called shell32.dll in C:\Windows\system32? Without it, windows will not be able to display any dialog boxes (including the windows logon screen or winlogon box). If the file is there, you could always attempt to do an actual repair installation using the CD, to restore files and then re-patch it once it's fixed. Did you try to modify the windows shell in any way with a 3rd party utility, perhaps?

If you run the command "net view \\computername" from each machine against the two others, do any of the machines have problems enumerating the shares on another machine from this command?

That's what I expected. Consider running autoruns and shellexview, disable anything non-Microsoft in both those apps, and reboot. If the problem goes away, start re-enabling things a few at a time until the problem returns. This will likely end up being a trial-and-error of enabling and disabling things in these two apps to figure out who or what is causing this .

Hmmm - so they get all the way to the background, but the winlogon dialog box doesn't appear. It almost sounds like the network stack didn't come up, but the winlogon box should display regardless of this unless there's some blocking going on here. If you've got the ability to send keystrokes via PS2 emulation to the machines, I'd say getting a complete dump of one of them when the problem occurs would be a good next step, as a dump might tell us what's happening in the kernel and in usermode when the box hangs up like that.

Are these x86 servers using PAE to access the additional RAM, or are they x64 servers (it'll matter )?

You might want to configure the machine for a complete memory dump, in this case, and then crash the box when the problem happens again.

Well, the power scheme at the logon screen is not the same as the one you use as a user (until you save it and reboot, then the last power scheme used is also used at the logon screen). If you are running as admin and disable UAC and set the power scheme and reboot, does it work? If not, I'd have to blame something running when you login, as the driver itself is obviously capable of sleeping .

I'm pretty sure they'll send you a CD if you fax them a copy of the COA and product key. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember doing this a few years ago in a similar situation.

OK, so the communication with the print spooler and the driver is working, so I'd bet a print processor or print monitor is causing this. Can you delete all of the queues, uninstall all of the drivers (from the printers/faxes applet, click File > Server Properties, click the "Drivers" tab, and uninstall all drivers listed), then just install a generic text-only printer and try that?

Definitely good to know when someone is trying to use the administrator account then

You can, but may I suggest something less dangerous: disabling and renaming the administrator account, then creating a new account called 'administrator' as a very limited guest user, and disabling that account as well. Once that's done, enable auditing for all account access on the 'administrator' account (the new one) - you'll find that a much more effective way of catching intruders and malicious users than deleting a built-in account.

One question - does print preview work in one of these apps? Those use the print drivers to display the file (IE does not), so if that fails then we'd know it was a problem talking to the spoolsv.exe process for some reason.

The key does the same thing, but it's on a per-user basis (HKCU) and is easier to roll back than a GPO (and easier to target as a test). The key is for testing, the GPO is for if the key works (but it sounds like you've already found the answer to that ).

Ah - just built a SP2 VM, and it works Just never use Home, so I was unsure. Back to pro now anyway.

I've got a W2K box I'm connecting to that has me at 16 million colors - can't speak to NT4, but 2K seems to use up to 16 million. Check the RDP-Tcp connector properties in TS config - you may be able to configure it higher than that there.

Does this only happen when installing with an x64 disc? Is it safe to assume that if you try to install with the x86 XP disc the problems don't occur?

Have you tried something like Paint.net? I believe it does this by default.