Fixing Logon Failure errors in XP Home

Management, Security

A client running XP Home today had an issue with a machine running slowly, and in the (ab)normal course of troubleshooting, we came across some errors in the event viewer that caused us to reset the security descriptors back to their defaults… and in doing so, we broke his printer sharing. (Oops!)

For those of you at home, we reset the security back to baseline via the secedit utility — something we carry with us on our USB keys since it doesn’t ship with XP Home:

secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose

So, since it’s XP Home, we didn’t have a lot of tools available to us, so we replied upon the Win2k3 Resource Kit tools to help us reset the Guest account, so it had access to the local printer:

The remote user was getting the message “Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer”

So we confirmed the guest account was turned on via:

net user guest /active:yes

And then we allowed it to logon from the network. (Case sensitivity rules in effect):

ntrights +r SeNetworkLogonRight -u Guest

And we had to remove the DENY right, since it takes precedence in all transactions:

ntrights -r SeDenyNetworkLogonRight -u Guest

Once we did that, the other computer was able to print again.

Leave a Comment