Authentication settings for network computers

[gengakusha]

I have been trying to get to the bottom of a connection problem for days but am stumped and wonder whether anyone has any ideas.

I have a machine running Windows 7 with two users both with admin rights. The only (intentional) differences between the rights and settings for the two users are the locale and display language. But even though I can connect to a Mac running OX X 10.6.8 on the same LAN from one of the users, I can't from the other.

The machine appears in the network for both users, but for one when I open it I am not prompted for credentials and I can only see the public folders. How can I force Windows 7 to prompt for authentication so I can connect using credentials from the Mac? For the first user this happened without me having to do anything (or at least I was not aware of doing anything to specifically make it prompt for credentials).

Both users have the LAN Manager authentication level set to "LM and NTLM – use NTLMV2 session security if negotiated"

[gengakusha]

Further testing seems to support my supposition that this is a problem of credential caching.

Logged in as the 'English' user if I manually enter "¥¥machinename¥" in Explorer I'm prompted for credentials and can then access all the shares on the remote Mac.

Logged in as the 'non-English' manually entering "¥¥machinename¥" in Explorer takes me straight to the public folders on the Mac. But if I enter "¥¥machinename¥sharename¥" I'm prompted for credentials and can then access the share. I've been searching the registry but can't find where these credentials might be stored.

Whilst it's not related to the problem, for some reason the Mac machine name and icon no longer appear in the "Network" section of Explorer even though I have made no changes to settings since last testing. This is an inconvenience rather than a problem as I can manually type the name but if anyone knows what controls whether or not the icon appears I'd be grateful if you could let me know.

Thanks