When working for a long time with XP without resetting (yep, that’s error number one right there), my laptop, when taken from location A to location B and back to A seems to be unable to connect to some Samba(SMB) resources protected with a password. Windows reports that my credentials (username/password) are incorrect while they are not.

I haven’t been able to find out what causes this, but I have found how to work around this without resetting. It was quite trivial actually, but when talking to other people they would simply comment; ‘just reboot, all will be fine’. This is not ok with me, because I use hibernate on my laptop so I don’t have to wait to reboot Windows, which is still very very slow. Usually after a few days of hibernations, Windows starts to break; it doesn’t work properly anymore; windows don’t open/close, networking problems like described here today etc. I usually first kill explorer.exe with taskmgr and then restart it, if that doesn’t work I log off and on (still takes a lot less than rebooting completely). This usually does the trick, except for the samba problem…

To see if you have the problem; just type a resource into explorer, for instance;

\10.0.0.13store

in my case.

It will be stuck for a while and then tell you you don’t have enough rights on the resource and to contact your admin.

Open a cmd prompt (left-windows-r + cmd + enter) and type:

net use

You will see the connection you are trying to open in the list, frustratingly enough probably with a status ‘OK’ (no it isn’t you cannot open it you piece of ()*%#@%**)#@).

Then type:

net use \10.0.0.13store /delete

And then try to open the connection again. It’ll work now.