Differences

[Jerry]

A friend was at my place for a four-day visit.

He does not have high-speed access at home so we were going to netwotk his
laptop to my desktop and copy files from mine to his. (Previously done
successfully during his last visit in February.)

Things were not going as expected this time.

Comparing our two systems we ran across an oddity that we think was a
contributor to the problem.

Opening Explorer on his system and going to \Documents and Settings we
noticed that his folder listing was a bit odd. For example mine showed
\Administrator and his showed \Administrator.(computer name) and \(His
name).(computer name) but when he logged on as either Administartor or User
(His Name) he did not include the (computer name) as part of his name and
things worked as expected.

We spent quite a bit of time researching things to try to come to an aswer
for this anomoly. (XP Resource Hit, Windows Inside Out, and other books)

He could get to the web with his system but we never sould get the two to
network.

He headed back to Northern California this morning so any suggestions or
solutions will be forwarded to him and resultsmay take a while but I told
him I'd post this question and send him any results.

Thanks

Jerry

 

[Patrick Keenan]

A friend was at my place for a four-day visit.

He does not have high-speed access at home so we were going to netwotk his
laptop to my desktop and copy files from mine to his. (Previously done
successfully during his last visit in February.)

Things were not going as expected this time.

Comparing our two systems we ran across an oddity that we think was a
contributor to the problem.

Opening Explorer on his system and going to \Documents and Settings we
noticed that his folder listing was a bit odd. For example mine showed
\Administrator and his showed \Administrator.(computer name) and \(His
name).(computer name) but when he logged on as either Administartor or
User (His Name) he did not include the (computer name) as part of his name
and things worked as expected.

This sometimes happens when there's been a secondary install. Rather than
overwrite the original user account structures, the install renames the
original (or the new one - I forget). In any case, there should be two
sets of (some) accounts if you examine the \documents and settings folders.

I'm looking, in another window, at a drive on another machine where this
happened.

As I recall, this results in two sets of directories but only one set of
working accounts. Most importantly, this can affect any XP encryption that
was invoked. Since the new account is not the same as the old one, unless
the encryption keys were backed up any encrypted files are lost.

HTH
-pk