We recently learned the hard way about the 'un-expected' cause of a Windows access denied error, when trying to access network shared drives. The problem turned out to be that the Windows XP, control panel, users applet does NOT really rename a user. Instead it renames the user in that display and uses the original name in making network connections. It may be possible to review and change the registry to clean up this change, but we found it simpler to:

1. Change the name back,
2. Set up a new Windows XP user with administrative privileges to facilitate network peer-to-peer server access, and
3. Begin to use the new user.

This made our names and passwords consistent with network resources and everything worked! (We could of course, and later did, go back and delete the old user names.)

Hint

If you need to change a user name but keep all their settings and attributes the surest way to do it is to create the new user name, log out and then log on with the new user name.  The immediately restart the PC and log on as a system administrator (But, not one that uses the old user name) and then copy the profile from the old user name to the new user name.  This will take awhile, but the results are usually exactly what is desired.   If this technique is of interest you may wish to see our guild titled: "Copying User Profiles in Win XP & 2000 Professional".

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