Hey folks,
Yesterday I was called on-site to a client whose Vista workstation would not boot up. In short, it would hang during the initial green scrolling bar. I narrowed out a few things and, finding that the last thing done to the workstation was installing this week's Patch Extravaganza, I used System Restore to roll the system back to a couple of days ago. The workstation was able to boot up fine. I logged in and slowly installed each patch, rebooting each time, to make sure I could get it current. No problems.
Since then, a really strange issue has cropped up.
In short, I cannot remote to the workstation. Well that's not entirely correct. I can get to the initial screen, but no DOMAIN username/password combinations work. (I can authenticate using a local computer account.) The console can login, of course, but
RDP connections can't authenticate with domain credentials, including Domain Admins. The only error I get is that my username password combination did not work.
And here's something else: LogMeIn won't authenticate either. (I haven't tried local credentials via LMI.)
At this point, I'm thinking something's messed with the computer's security token as it pertains to the domain. But... shares are accessible, Exchange works, printing works. I'm pretty sure that if we were relying solely on cached credentials, shares and Exchange would show authentication prompts at least. When I altered the local security policy to add myself as a person who could remote in, I received an error about an inability to save the policy but my changes stuck. It did not fix the problem.
I've checked the security logs in SBS 2008 to find any events relating to this computer or the primary login but there's nothing there.
I'm basically posting here before I do something more drastic like: Rolling the system back to an earlier time to see if the issue persists -or- rejoining the domain.
(Or buying a new computer. This workstation is wicked old.)
Cheers,
Mike...
