Jesse Schibilia

I have had a problem with one of my XP desktops for several months. None of my computers were able to access any of the shares or printers on that computer. It had bothered me for a long time, but it was never a terribly worrisome problem so I never really plugged away at it. Today I sat down to try and figure it out and I wanted to share my solution to this very specific problem.

Symptoms:

When trying to access shares on the offending Windows XP box from another Windows XP box:

• You can see the offending computer on the network.
• When you try to access this computer, you get the following error message:
• “Error: \\pcName is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource…Access is denied.”

When trying to access shares on the offending Windows XP box from an OS X machine:

• The computer is shown in the Finder under Network > network name and you can click the connect button.
• When you click the connect button, you get a login screen for the network resource, then the following error message:
• “The alias ‘pcName’ could not be opened because the original item cannot be found.” (Options: Delete Alias, Fix Alias, OK…none of which do anything to help the situation.)

Solution:

Type ‘regedit’ into the run line off of your start menu. Navigate yourself to the following section of your registry:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

Look for the following registry value:

• RestrictAnonymous

The default value should be 0, but networking problems can arise if the default value has changed to 1. If this value is set to 1 in your registry, change it to 0 and close regedit. This registry value deals with the sharing and enumeration of shares. You do not need to touch any other values within the LSA section of the registry tree.

Try to access the previously offending XP box from another networked machine. It should make a difference. You might try to restart the box after making the registry changes for good measure.

You can also fix this problem, or just cross-check that the solution worked with the registry fix, in the Local Security Policy Administrative Tool. In your Control Panel, go to Administrative Services, then Local Security Policy. Navigate to the following section of the tree:

• Local Policies > Security Options

Find the entry:

• Network Access: Do not allow anonymous enumeration of SAM accounts and shares.

This entry should be set to ‘Disabled’ by default. If you have made the above fix in the registry, it should now read ‘Disabled’. If you haven’t made the above fix in the registry, you can achieve the same results by changing the value to ‘Disabled’ here.

I hope this helps, it certainly helped me!  I think mine may have been messed up when I downloaded some type of freeware to help optimize XP.