Accounts Locked Out

Locked out accounts do unlock themselves after 15-30 mins.
What does the message say when you try to login!

Hi

thanks for the prompt reply.

am receiving normal error message as if wrong password had been entered, however, the user of this machine had user rights so they would have been unable to change any passwords. also when running linux pass_nt which examins accounts on an nt system - it keeps showing that accounts have been locked - we have left machines for approx 2 days but they are not unlocking. we were wanting to find a solution rather than rebuilding as this has now happened 5 machines and we currently have over 200 xp machines installed so you can see why rebuilding is not an option.

If these systems are members of a domain, you could manage them remotely with AD Users and Computers and unlock the local system accounts.

If you mean the domain accounts are locked out, you can unlock those from Users and computers as well.

If machine accounts are locked, you will need to use NETDOM to reset the RPC session passwords. Unfortunately, you will need to go to every system to do this.

In addition, I wouldn't lock every account out of Recovery Console, as their are times you will need it.

Unfortunately we are not using MS Domains - we use workgroups and connect to Novell servers.

I did find an utility called erd commander by 3rd party but it is a bit pricey to cure a few machines - do you know if MS have a similar tool.

Have just run Windows repair from Install CD but to no avail - just keeps firing up general error message "Failed to connect to Windows Workstation"

Microsoft has incorporated security features in some of their updates to lock users out of computers if they are running an illegal copy of windows. You can read more on the topic here:
http://www.betanews.com/article/1084264398

Thanks for your remarks Krystal however as these are brand new HP machines each with their own Serial Code to run Windows XP I would severely doubt that this is what is causing my problem - also as per your link, these machines have already been upgraded to SP2 weeks ago with any problems and usually when running Windows XP with a pirate version you would get an error message to that effect and not what is currently happening. These machines have also been syspreped and registered with MS so if it had of been a licensing problem it would have been raised before now.

I have used this cd on computers that the user had locked them selfs out of, I dont know if it will work in this case. But it is called BartPE it is free on the web, but has a steep learning curve. It will let you into any XP, Win200 computer or server and with programs you can add to it you can export the SAM file fix it and put it back. So you can let the person log in. It also sounds like one of the patches has stoped the communication of the computer to the Novell servers. If the computer can not be seen or the server dose not know the computer it will not let it on the network.

home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/editor.html

Password recovery and registry editor. Not that hard to use and free.