I have a client who has 3 Windows XP home computers. They were sharing Quickbooks Pro across these three by using one computer as a “server”. Well this “server” ended up getting multiple trojans, viruses and spyware installed onto it making it non accessible from the other 2 machines. We ended up working a few hours off and on each day for the past week trying to get this thing back on-line. We used HP’s recovery partion, XP’s restore point, and many other winsock and network reset utilities to no-avail. It wasn’t until I broke down and took the computer home did I stumble upon the Windows XP Network Problem Solver page by Hans-Georg Michna tht I was able to crack this problem. This computer was having the infamous “Logon failure: The user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer.” message when connecting from another PC. It wasn’t until I followed the instructions of the aformentioned page did I fix this problem. Here is the code (note: you must first download the “Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit” to use the ntrights utility. See the link above for instructions)

net user guest /active:yes
ntrights +r SeNetworkLogonRight -u Guest
ntrights -r SeDenyNetworkLogonRight -u Guest

So simple and intuitive right? It had to be done because XP Home as limitations on networking built in that XP Pro does not. The moral of this story has two parts: 1) Always use XP pro in a networked, business, or home office environment and 2) never do work for a client who is having file sharing and networking issues in XP Home MAKE them upgrade or tell them to call someone else!