Deadcode

I was tearing my hair out trying to get Windows 9x/ME clients (VMs and one real machine) to connect to my file shares served by Windows 7. I'd previously gotten it to work just fine served by Windows XP, so I set it up identically under Windows 7, to be greeted by it not working. Absolutely nothing I found Googling about this problem led me to a solution. I tried: Navigating directly to the shares by path Setting LmCompatibilityLevel and NoLmHash on the server side Setting LMCompatibility on the client side Installing dsclient9x.msi on the client Enabling NetBIOS on the server side Changing the network type from Public to Home on the server side Setting the Full Name of the account to be equal to its Name instead of being blank Actually logging in locally on the server side to an account meant only for file-sharing use Rebooting both the server and client after changing all of the above settings and more So if anyone coming across this thread still hasn't got this to work, here's the last thing I finally figured out: Account passwords are case-sensitive in Windows Vista and above, but are case-insensitive on Windows 9x/ME. Apparently the password is converted to lowercase by the 9x/ME client when sent over the network, because I had to change my mixed-case passwords to lowercase on the server side. With that done, it worked! As it turned out, I only needed to do two things differently under Windows 7 than I had under XP: Set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LmCompatibilityLevel to a DWORD value of 1 on the server side (which is the same as going to Control Panel → Administrative Tools → Local Security Policy → Local Policies → Security Options, and setting "Network security: LAN Manager authentication level" to "Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated"). (Attempts to get the client to use NTLMv2 failed.) Note that a reboot is not needed after changing this setting. Use lowercase passwords on the server side. I reverted all the other changes I'd made, because none of them had any effect. Which is a shame, because it would've been nice to get the Windows 9x/ME clients to use NTLMv2, but maybe that only works for domains, and not workgroups? Oh, and I do have to navigate directly to the shares, but I don't mind that at all; I map them to drive letters anyway.