Strange User Problems

[Guest]

So, I have a user that has, for the past month, reported strange network
interactions. First of all, sometimes she's "locked out" when she tries to
log in... and then if she waits 5 minutes, she is magically "unlocked" and
can access the network. Sometimes she is genuinely locked out, but swears
she types in her password correctly. Sometimes when the machine will tell
her she's locked out, she will ask one of the site techs to unlock her, but
when they check her profile, they find she is NOT locked out. Very strange.

Some other strange things are:

- her login script will run and map her drives for her, but she can only SEE
them. When she tries to access these drives, including her own personal
folder, she is told that she has the wrong credentials and needs to submit
the proper userid and password. What's super strange about this is that one
of the drives that maps, the Shared drive, is accessible by Everyone. So...
ummm... I'm really at a loss here. I'm not sure where to begin.

At first, with the locked out issue, I thought maybe it's like some people
have reported before... with Win XP, not all of the network resources seem to
load before the login screen allows a user to log in. The solution is to
have the users wait 5-10 seconds before logging on.

But then with the strange drive mappings, I began to wonder if her whole
profile wasn't unravelling. So one of our techs rebuilt her profile today.
It didn't help.

Now I am completely and utterly lost. I don't know where else to begin.
Does anyone else have any ideas?

~CJ

 

[Guest]

I just wanted to clarify that it doesn't seem to matter what type of machine
she is on.. she has tried 3. Also, The errors are random and I cannot
duplicate them on command.

 

[Malke]

I just wanted to clarify that it doesn't seem to matter what type of
machine
she is on.. she has tried 3. Also, The errors are random and I cannot
duplicate them on command.

Have your best tech - maybe that's you - sit down with the user and
*watch* her. She's obviously doing something wrong since the problems
follow her from known-working machine to known-working machine. Watch
her carefully. You may have to watch her for an extended time, but
you'll see what she does to produce the glitches and you'll have an
"aha!" moment.

Malke

 

[Rube]

We had a similar problem where the user's old computer was now in use as a
misc. machine. The computer had a program (running as a service) that
occasionally accessed a network share with old credentials, that were input
way-back-when and never updated. The only way we found it was by checking
the security event logs on our domain controllers for failures from that
user. It displays the workstation name in the error. Happy hunting. . .