[Samba] explorer.exe crashing at login

[Sam Hart]

I don't think I'll be able to help solve your problem completely, but I 
may be able to send you in the right direction. We recently had this 
problem as well, and found that giving the users higher priviledges on 
their local client machines solved the problem (which, for our users, was 
not a desirable solution).

It turns out in our situation it had nothing to do with samba being 
configured incorrectly, but in the fact that the ntuser.* files in their 
profile directories had older (now incorrect) information in them (after 
the upgrade).

The way I had to solve it was to log in the users (non-priviledged) with 
out having their profiles roaming (so that Windows created a new profile 
for them) and then manually copy their new ntuser.* (uh... ntuser.dat, 
ntuser.dat.log and ntuser.ini, I think) files from the new profile back 
into their old profile (and then setting them back up to access their old 
profile) Doing this kludge solved the problem you are talking about in our 
system.

I am guessing (and this is just a shot in the dark) that in our case, the 
upgrade caused Winwoes (W2K) to think the domain had changed, and that 
this caused the previous profile information on the client machine to be 
lost (at least, when viewing ownership on the client machine, the user 
name was replaced with a long string of garbage).

begin  quote: On 03-02-19, Orion Poplawski wrote:

> We're running a network of Windows 2000 SP3 machines with Samba 2.2.7 as
> the PDC and roaming profile store.  Certain users logging onto certain
> machines will see an error dialogue pop-up saying explorer.exe has
> generated errors and will exit.  This keeps popping up and to only
> course of action is to ctrl-alt-del and logout.  For most people,
> everything works fine.
> 
> I've been able to clear it up temporarily my moving the profile
> directory out of the way on the server, but the problem can re-occur.
<snip>
> 
> This seems to have started after I made some changes to our samba
> server, and may have lost certain machine trust information, but I'm not
> sure.
> 
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-- 
Sam Hart
University/Work addr. <hart at physics.arizona.edu>
Personal addr. <criswell at geekcomix.com>
end