I've just spent several hours trying to solve "an unexpected error occurred" while I was accessing my Local Area Connection properties on a Windows 2000 machine. I'm sending this message as penance for blaming Samba.
The "an unexpected error occurred" message came up everytime I tried to view the properties of my Local Area Connection but there were other problems within Network and Dial-up Connections. For example, the Make New Connection wizard would only allow Dial-up to the Internet connections even though I am an Administrator. These problems would only manifest themselves if I logged into our Samba domain. My local account worked just fine. If I disconnected my network cable and logged in using my locally cached profile (we're using roaming profiles in the domain), the problem also went away. Another clue was only Windows 2000 machines were affected; Windows NT and Windows XP domain members worked just fine. The problem turned out to be a file in my [homes] share. At one time I had copied SETUPAPI.DLL to my H: drive ([homes] share) to fix a Windows NT problem. This SETUPAPI.DLL file was in the root directory of my [homes] share and somehow, this file caused all my problems. After I removed or changed the name of this file, everything worked the way it should. The SETUPAPI.DLL was from a Windows NT machine so I'm guessing it was used by the Windows 2000 machine and broke any functions that use SETUPAPI.DLL. I had no idea a .dll file in a Windows share could cause operating system errors (or maybe SETUPAPI.DLL is the only one, in which case lucky me). If you come across an unexplainable Windows error in the future, try changing the location of your [homes] share to a temporary empty directory or see if you have any dll's in that share. -- Michael Hulet Network System Administrator ITTC, University of Kansas -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
