Removing Administrative Shares

The effect is that windows will recreate them for you the next time you restart windows. In other words you can not remove those shares. Windows recreates them every time windows starts.

Removing the administrative shares will not affect the server. In fact I have no idea why Microsoft insists on making NT/2000 have these, they don't seem to serve much of a usefull purpose. I normally get rid of all shares that aren't needed to tighten security. I've never had any problems with the servers being able to replicate, transfer email, serve networked apps or any other things that shares are needed for. Hope this helps.

The shares are created to enable single seat administration. Without them, you must physically go to a system to create a new share point. They also allow other remote management. If you are comfortable with the concept that you will quite often have to physically go to the system in order to manage it, you can safely remove these shares without adverse effect.
Just as a point of interest, the admin shares do not decrease your security one iota, contrary to the second post. They are administrators\full control only, and cannot be modified. To say that it is insecure to allow your administrators access to a resource is slightly amusing...to say the least!

Good luck,

Ian

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