I find it very odd that I’m ranting about a Microsoft Windows XP issue. I rarely use XP anymore and when I do it generally just works. You don’t want to get me going about Vista (especially when it comes to “User Account Control”; I have a long post coming about that but I can’t finish it because I get too irritated every time I sit down to write it!), but I’m usually pretty happy with XP…

I have one XP machine remaining in my house. It’s a desktop machine that sits in the back corner of my basement and mostly acts as my file server. It wouldn’t be my first choice of machine for that purpose, but I’ve had it for years and it still works, so I leave it there. I’ve been using it as my iTunes server for a long time and so it was an obvious choice to use as the primary connection to my new Media Player as well (see my recent review of the Popcorn Hour PCH-A110).

The Popcorn Hour is a network connected device with an internal hard drive that mounts as a network share. It was a piece of cake to get it connected to my home network, and I was transferring files onto it within a few minutes of opening the box. It was just that easy.

Until the XP machine needed a reboot after a Windows update. That’s when XP started to annoy me. It turns out that Windows XP Home is designed not to save passwords for mapped network drives. You can connect to a drive by giving it the password when you map it, but it doesn’t keep the password after a reboot…  Every other version of XP, NT, or Vista has this capability, but XP home does not.

I had to come up with a workaround to get the machine to “remember” the password.

1. create a new file in the startup folder with a .cmd extension. I called mine connect.pch.
2. open the file in a text editor (notepad is fine)
3. add the following line of code to the file:

NET USE U: \ComputerNameShareName password user:UserName

Where U: is the desired drive letter

This file is a Windows Command File which will execute every time windows boots up.  Essentially I have created a program that will remap my drive every time the computer reboots.  It’s kludgy and it’s ugly, but it’s simple and it works.

It should be easier than this.

I’m the type of guy that uses keyboard shortcuts all the time. It’s simply faster and more efficient, and it works for me. So back in the Windows XP days I got very used to using Win+L to change users (ie. to log into a different account) when working on a computer with multiple user accounts. This is a very common situation in common areas in offices or more likely around the home. This nifty little key combination automatically took the user from the current application or the desktop directly to the welcome screen where you could select the account you wanted to use.

Along came Windows Vista and they added an intermediate step to the process. Hitting Win+L now locks current user account rather than going to the welcome screen. The user is presented with the option to enter their password to access the recently active user account, or to hit the Switch Users button to bring up the welcome screen. Aside from adding a step (which is often time-consuming as Vista has to think about who-knows-what after each selection is made), this change is also pointless and is definitely not an improvement over going directly to the welcome screen. Chalk this one up to the massive list of “what-were-they-thinking” developments that arrived with Vista.

(If you hadn’t figured it out already, in Vista the term “Fast User Switching” really only means that more than one user can be logged in at the same time; however, only one user can actually be connected at any one time. Switching between those users is not necessarily very fast. This is not intuitive and what most users really want is a way to switch between users quickly, or even instantly!)

There a couple of options to getting around the Locked screen:

1. The first option is free, and it comes courtesy of Quinn Lewis: Quinn pointed me to a hack using a utility that comes with Vista called TsDiscon.exe. Creating a shortcut to this utility and adding a custom keyboard shortcut will allow you to automatically jump to the welcome screen. Apparently this trick doesn’t work for everyone, but it worked perfectly for me. If you want to give it a try there is a tutorial on how to do it over at The Winhelponline Blog.
2. The second option is to buy an app called DUST (Direct User Switching Task). This app gives you the option to cycle through the currently logged on users, or to disconnect your session, by hitting Win+S. The beauty of this app is that it takes you directly to any other user accounts that are already logged in, bypassing both the Locked screen AND the Welcome Screen. The only negative is that it is not free. At only $15 it’s not all that expensive, but the $15 only entitles you to use it on one computer. If you have several shared computers then you will need to purchase a license for each machine.

If anyone has any new or better (eg. free) ways to make this work, I’d love to hear about. Please leave a note in the comments. Let’s all hope that this process is streamlined in Windows 7…