Offer Remote Assistance - stopped working - change RPC?

[Per Hagstrom]

We have been using Offer Remote Assistance (not Invite Remote Assistance) to
be able to connect to all our users to help/support them. Now of a sudden it
stopped working.

We get this error: "A program could not start. Please try again."

Tried everything we could think of, searching all over the Microsoft site,
nothing helped. Firewall turned off, turned on all required services etc...
(plus it was working the last week!)
Finally found this link on Google where somebody says to check on
Services-Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and make sure it's not using the
Network Service as Log On account. And sure enough, everybody has RPC set to
use Network Service. Tried to change one workstation to Local Service,
reboot, and voila, now it's working again!

Sooo... how/why did this change?! Did a Windows Update change this
recently?! And if so, was it changed for a reason, and is changing it to
Local System breaking something else? And if it's OK to change this on all
workstations, what would be the easiest way of changing all workstations on
the network? (1500 workstations)

Anyone who knows anything about this?

BIG TIA!!!!!

/ Per

 

[Per Hagstrom]

Well, we ended up pushing out the registry change to everybody, to change
the account for the RPC service:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RpcSs\ObjectName (value
data=LocalSystem)

Hope it might help someone else?!

/ Per