XP Home won't remember network passwords

Easy "fix": Create a file, login.bat and put it on your desktop and (optionally) shortcut in Startup


net use h: \\servername\sharename /user:domainname\username password


or to have it ask your password:

net use h: \\servername\sharename /user:domainname\username *


change h: to whatever drive letter makes sense. Once the password is entered, it should affect all connections to \\servername including printers.

CAVEAT: of course password is in PLAIN TEXT so, you know, if you lose control of your PC, you lose your security.

Right-click, New freeze in XP

I've tried shellex, shellnew, tweakui, and a whole host of other things that wouldn't fix a freeze or hang when trying to do a New context menu, either in right-click, new, or File, new.

Then I found it worked on another logon. That was enough for me.

For non-domains, it's pretty obnoxious, but you can simply create a new user and transfer stuff between old and new. Outlook Express is in a special case.

For domains, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. An admin can go in and in this particular case probably move or rename the ntuser.dat for the affected user so the user can get a new profile. Once that is accomplished, it should be rather trivial to move favorites, etc. If the old user folder was in c:\documents and settings\username, the new user folder will be in c:\documents and settings\username.domain.

Hope this helps someone. At least it prevented me from having to do a full reinstall of OS.

Dude, Dell's back with XP.

Whether it makes a difference to me or not is immaterial. However, for full disclosure, Dell went back to offering XP on select models of PCs. Still, Microsoft's going to force no new sales of XP in January 2008.

Apparently, though, owners of Vista Business and Vista Ultimate (at least Volume License purchasers) continue to have downgrade rights to XP Pro, so there *is* hope if you're delaying. Now, finding the XP Pro install media might be a bit harder.