Hello,

I would just like to give back to the tech community in regards to a problem I had experienced today which took me the majority of the day to solve. This is a specific problem for those who want to map a network drive to a network share using a different user account than the currently logged on user.

First and foremost, Media Center Edition 2005 is not suppose to support caching credentials. But I have two identical Media Center 2005 Computers. one worked & one didn't.

The first computer I mapped a network drive and in the mapped network drive dialogue box there is a link that says: Connect using a different username. If you select that option before you connect to the mapped network drive you can specify the appropriate username and password and cross your fingers that when you reboot the network drive is re-established. As it should remember the username and password you type in. This had actually worked on the first Media Center 2005 PC. On the second PC however I wasn't so fortunate. As a quick work around I decided to use a batch file that would delete the mapped network drive and re-establish the network drive on startup. This seemed to temporarily work, but after a while of being logged on the mapped network drives seemed to lose the logon credentials forcing me to re-run the batch file again. (/persistent was set to yes on the net use command fyi).

But to permanently resolve this problem of the mapped network drives not re-connecting after logoff/logon or rebooting I had to make an offline registry change.

Please follow these steps and note: This will disable fast user switching and will not allow you to use media extenders (XBOX 360). This will also allow XP Media Center Edition 2005 to connect to a Domain.

1) Dual boot into a parallel Windows install or use Bart’s PE (I used Bart PE)
2) Start Registry Editor, click on HKEY_Local_Machine
3) Click on File, Load Hive
4) Select c:\Windows\System32\Config\System file
5) Give it a name: MCE
6) Browse to HKEY_Local_Machine\MCE\WPA\MedCtrUpg
7) Change IsLegacyMCE to 1 (ONE)
8) Browse to HKEY_Local_Machine\MCE
9) Click File, Unload Hive
10) Reboot the PC

Now once you've rebooted don't map a network drive just yet. Instead connect directly to the share you want to map using the NetBIOS name. Instead of the IP in the start menu>run dialogue box. Example: (\\server\myshare) You will receive a window that prompts you for a username and a password. But now you will have the ability to check the box that indicates to save the logon and password credentials. Once you've typed the correct username and password be sure to check the box that says remember password. Now you can map a network drive directly to your share. When creating the mapped network drive do not attempt to connect using a different username otherwise you'll receive an error when mapping the drive stating the connection is already established by the user from the step prior. Just map the drive without assigning a user to the share. It will now automatically re-connect you to the mapped network drive upon rebooting and or logging off and on.

Hope this helps,
-Paul