Be our guest!
I was using the great psservice tool from Sysinternals to execute some test scripts. It was getting ‘access denied’ when connecting to a local box running Windows XP. This behavior was unexpected because both boxes are in the same workgroup and the user accounts have matching names & passwords.
A little sleuthing turned up the problem. Apparently XP ships with heightened security so by default users are logged in over the network as guests.
It’s easy to switch. To change the default so that users get their own credentials when accessing XP over the network, switch the settings to what Microsoft calls Classic.
Start “Help and Support” on your system and search for “Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts” to see how to make the change in Local Security Policies.