Steve Lee :: Blog :: Fixed: Vista failing to access my shares that work with XP

I recently spent some time fixing a problem where any attempt to use an UNC name in explorer to access a share from Vista was failing with Logon failure: account currently disabled. The reason this really annoyed me was the share was on my READY-NAS, was open to guest (no login) and both XP Samba on Ubuntu had no problem accessing it on the workgroup. I even tried enabling the vista guest account to no avail.

After a lot of googling I enventually tried Net Use in case a mapped drive would work (and I could use DOS/Windows file path even though the days of patchy UNC path support are long gone.This gave me error 1331 which turns out to be 'a cache credentials issue. what ever that might be. The fix is to use

  net use x: \\computer\share /user:guest

and you can magically access all shares on the device without any more problems.

This is a nasty hack as it ties up a drive but that's not a big issue. A bigger problem is you can't make it persistent as it fails to login again without any user error or prompt. Thus you have to do this each time you want to access the drive after a restart. I guess it's a bug in Vista but perhaps there is a better solution. I don't have time to find it. Does anyone know?

Vaguely related rambling

Recalling that UNC names are supported in nearly all applications these days prompted the memory that at least since DOS 3.1, system calls support / as well as \ as the path separator. In fact there was even an interrupt (API) to change the command line switch character from / to - which removes the obvious clash. In fact I've been using this as a somewhat lazy hack to specify local paths on Windows in some Mozilla XUL to avoid using the platform independent path APIs. The pretend portability of using POSIX style paths obviously falls down if you need to specify a Drive in WIndows' multi-rooted file system.