I received a call yesterday from a user who was having problems with a network printer. She could get the printer to work sometimes, but when she rebooted the computer, the printer would not work at all. The printer was connected to a Windows 2000 Pro computer and all the computers in the office were in the same workgroup.
I checked the network places and saw a share on the Windows 2000 PC. When I tried to access it, the PC asked for a username and password. I checked the Windows 2000 PC and saw three users listed. I used one of the usernames (user1) with no password and was able to connect to the share. i tried the printer again and now it worked. But once I restarted the PC, the printer and share no longer worked without the username.
The first thing I tried was renaming the current username (owner) on the PC to user1. This did not make a difference (I think internally the username was still being referred to as owner). So step 2 was to create a new user (user2) and move owner’s files and settings to user2’s profile. With that done, I restarted and successfully connected to both the share and the printer without the prompt for a username and password.
The biggest thing I felt I learned from this brief adventure is that renaming a username does not change its guts. If you need a particular username on a PC, create a user with that name.