I had an issue a week or 2 ago where 90% of the time I could not get my desktop drawn/loaded after logging in. The other 10% of the time, I could get in after waiting a couple minutes.
… so I reloaded WinXP x64
And everything was fine… until today. “What? CFP Beta 3.0.8.214 goes for a week or so and then funny things happen?”
Maybe… but what changed between yesterday and today? Well I finally got to the point of installing Money 2004, went online to pay for my MAPS subscription, and noticed I needed to reinstall the driver for my printer when I decided to print my receipt; printer being shared off my son’s PC.
Now in my home, I used to have a domain configured, but after needing some “server” parts to keep another PC up, I reverted back to a workgroup. And as any lazy user/admin, I didn’t bother propagating the user/pwd combinations across all PC’s… rather I let my kids PC’s use the same vanilla user/pwd (made printer sharing easy between them) and I would just authenticate to my son’s PC whenever i needed to print… like I always had.
So when I started installing my Panasonic KX-P7105 drivers (uses a setup program), it would fail as I couln’t see the remote PC/Printer; wasn’t authenticated yet… darned thing wanted to be intelligent and verify things. So I decided to map a network drive to my son’s PC to keep authentication going. Installed the drivers and they asked for a reboot.
… and at this point is where my issue reappeared… I could log in, but no desktop. It may have come up, but i didn’t feel like waiting 2 minutes to find out.
So I uninstalled the printer driver… no good
I stopped the printer driver service that the uninstall didn’t clear… no good
I deactivated the “Money Express” helper application that Money 2004 installed… no good
I uninstalled CFP in despiration… no good (Beta 3.0.8.214)
What was left? The drive mapping…
I clobbered the drive mapping, rebooted, and things were fine.
Restarted the printer service… no issue
Installed the printer driver… slick
Reactived the money express tool… no problem
Reloaded CFP Beta 3.0.8.214, and other than a couple “can’t find icon” glitches (went away after a couple reboots)… going great
So… I took a moment and propagated my user credentials to all other PC’s… now I can access them all whenever, without working around the issue with drive mappings to authenticate.
The worst part is, as I had mentioned, I had reloaded my PC a couple weeks ago over what I believe was this same issue. But then again, windows always “feels” better after a reload, doesn’t it?
Oh, and the lesson is… don’t be quick to blame CFP Beta 3.0.8.214!!
(:TNG) :■■■■ :THNK (CLY)