Accessing "Program Files" from a LAN / fixing "missing" User accounts
Recently I was asked to find a way to restore access to "Program Files" from a network share for a customer of mine. I used to access program files from my lan at home, before SP2 came out, so I'm not sure when "Program Files" became a restricted directory.
I did a bit of research, and read a solution suggesting to use "control userpassword2", which, in my personal experience, broke the user account on XP Home. Now, I can't access the user account, and, for all intents and purposes, Windows XP thinks that the account is missing. You cannot modify the account from the User Accounts panel, and the account is missing from the login screen. I opened a command prompt (start > run > cmd) and typed the following commands:
net user listed the account as still being on the system
net user (username) listed the account has having no 'Groups'
net localgroup produced a list of local group policies on the machine.
to fix the broken account, using the info I just got from the previous commands, I typed;
net localgroup Administrators (username) /add
The account was an administrator account, so, I restored the Administrators group to the user account, and presto. Windows now recognises the account as a fully functional user account.
The next suggestion that I saw for fixing "program files" has to do with the way Windows allows access to network shares. Under XP Home, specifically, network shares are all accessed via the Guest account. I'm not sure about XP Professional, most of my customers have XP Home.
For this example, we'll just say that the groups consisted of *Administrators, *Guests, and *Users as listed by net localgroup.
The suggestion that I read suggested that the user add "Administrators" to the Guest account, but cautioned that this was not recommended.
Normal users (non administrators) have access to program files though, so, my solution, which seems to work fine, was to add Users to the guest account. I'm sure this isn't the best, or most secure solution, but it does work.
net localgroup Users Guest /add
then I exited the command prompt, and rebooted the computer.
I went to one of the other lan machines, and tried to access program files again from across the lan. Now, the networked machines have access to the program files directory.
While I know I am not an expert, and that there are probably better solutions to the problem, this solution does not involve registry editing, and is straight forward. I hope that this information will help users who accidentally deactivate user profiles, and those who wish to access "program files" on their local networks.
