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, and
3. Begin to use the new user.
That made our names and passwords consistent with network resources and everything worked! (We could of course go back and delete the old user names.)
