Cannot unlock W2K computer if user password contains french character

[Jim]

I have a user who has a french character in their password. They can
logon to their computer (Windows 2000 SP4) without a problem. If they
lock their computer, they receive the message "password is incorrect"
when they try to unlock it. The proper character is being generated
because we typed the password into the user field and it displayed
correctly. We even switched to the French input locale using Left ALT
SHIFT. Problem still occured. It doesn't matter whether the screen
saver locks the computer or if they manually lock it from the "ALT
CTRL DEL" window.

If another user logs on and locks the same computer, the problem
doesn't occur.

As a test, I went to another Windows 2000 SP4 computer, logged on and
was able to lock/unlock with my account. I then changed my password to
include a french character (e with the accent slanted to the right). I
experienced the same problem as the user.

It happens with the "input locale - keyboard" set to "French Canada -
Canadian Multilingual Standard" or "English (United States) - Canadian
French".

Can anyone help?

Thanks

Jim Stoddard

 

[Rob]

This is kinda obvious, but it's like going to the doctor
and saying.. my elbow hurts when I do this. He says, well
don't do that them.

Tell the user not to use those characters.

 

[Jim]

After a bit of testing, we've discovered the problem. When the user
changed their password at logon, the system used the default US
English keyboard layout. When the user tried to unlock their
workstation, it used the user's default French keyboard layout. It
just so happened that the user chose to use a special character in
their password which had a different mapping from the US english
keyboard layout. Not at all obvious.