Windows XP loses the domain controller?

I ran into an interesting problem last week with some Virtual Machines. I’ve set up 3 different machines, each running Windows XP with a different version of Progress (10.0, 10.1, and 10.2), to test how our application works under the various Progress versions and to develop with some of the latest tools (I love the Eclipse interface! :-) ). However, for some reason last week all the virtual machines, plus the virgin Windows XP install, decided to show me the following error message:

Windows cannot connect to the domain, either because the domain controller is down or otherwise unavailable, or because your computer account was not found.

Since I was rolling out a change to a web service running under 10.1 at the time, I was not a happy camper. It took me the better part of a day to try and come up with a solution. Unfortunately, none surfaced, even after some helpful hints from our systems engineer (“Did you reboot?” – “Yes.” – “Must be a Windows patch.” – “I have had no new patches in the last week and half.” etc.). The weekend came and went, and today I was back at the same problem. Ruling out anything general (like the domain controller actually being down – we could log in to everything except the VMs), I started scouring the Internets. And lo and behold, back in 2006 someone else had the same problem. With a regular XP machine. In a Windows domain. Wow!

In a nutshell, it comes down to the fact that the domain controller is confused about your machine and SID, and won’t trust you. Removing the machine from the domain, and adding it back in, solves the problem somehow.

Thank you, My Digital Life!

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Comments

  1. The actual steps are:

    Login to the Windows 2003 domain controller, and delete the computer account object from the Active Directory by using Microsoft Management Console (MMC) which you can always access from “Manage Your Server”.

    Log-in to the PC workstation as local administrator. If you cannot logon as local administrator, try to unplug the network cable and logon to the computer by using a domain administrator user that used to logon on the PC before, by using cached logon credentials feature.

    Go to Control Panel, then click on System icon, then go to Computer Name tab.

    Unjoin the computer from the domain by clicking on “Change”. You should see that Domain button is now selected. Remember your domain name in the text box. Select (Click) on “Workgroup” to remove the computer from the domain, and put any workgroup name in the text box (e.g. workgroup).

    Click OK to exit.

    Restart the computer (optional)

    Go back to the Control Panel, launch System properties and then go to Computer Name tab, and click on “Change”.

    Rejoin the domain by uncheck the Workgroup button and select (check) Domain button, and put in the domain name noted above into the text box.

    Click OK to exit.

    Reboot the PC.

    (Just in case the link in the article no longer works).

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