Windows Vista / 7 Error – “Server Execution Failure”

I’ve been running Windows 7 Ultimate for about 2 months now and I’ve only had one problem that was annoying and luckily not a major show stopper. I was working on the computer and decided to reboot for some reason. When I logged in, I received the error “Server Execution Failure” and could not open the Computer to view any drives and could not connect to any network drives. Otherwise, Windows worked fine.

I did some searching and found people who had experienced the problem under Vista. Solutions included reload (obviously a last resort) and re-registering certain dlls (which didn’t work for me). Someone described the problem as a “DCOM” error. There was also some complicated solution involving doing stuff with COM settings that also didn’t work for me. Finally, I found a solution which involved creating a new user profile. This was difficult because I don’t think I could get into Control Panel.  There was talk of enabling the Administrator account if it was disabled and using that account to create a new user or going into Computer Management | Local Users and Groups and creating a user there. I happened to have a user already that I had created when I first setup the computer. I logged in with the other user, and everything worked fine. It was almost like a reload since I had to reconfigure everything (very annoying), but at least I avoided an actual reload.

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