File & Printer Sharing Gets Turned Off On Reboot

[btreloar]

I have a Thinkpad T61 model 6465 running Windows XP SP2. It's networked to a few other PCs in my home office, all through Windows workgroup networking.

For the most part, networking works perfectly, with one exception. Every time I reboot the machine, it comes up with File & Printer Sharing unchecked in the Network Connections | Local Area Network properties. As soon as I re-check the box, file sharing works just fine.

I had a local IT support company send over a technician (at no small expense) and he found nothing awry with my setup, and told me to troubleshoot it with ZoneAlarm since I'm running ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite. A ZoneAlarm technician walked me through disabling ZoneAlarm and rebooting without ZoneAlarm coming up ... but the problem persisted.

So it must be some other configuration - I don't suppose it could possibly be a hardware issue. Can anyone help?

[GomJabbar]

I think when this kind of thing happens, Windows is not unloading the registry properly on shut down. As a result, the next time it boots, it uses an older backup copy that is slightly different than the current copy. Look for a file called userenv.log in the C:\WINDOWS\Debug\UserMode\ directory. You can open it in Notepad to view it. Delete the file, shutdown and reboot, and look for it again. It will display, if there were any problems during shutdown.

You can download and install a program from Microsoft called UPHClean that may work to solve your problem. Troubleshooting profile unload issues

You can also go to: Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer, to look for problems. On any errors, click on the error, and while online, click on the link to get more information on the error.

[Wiz]

Take a look at these two threads as well:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=48329
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=49227

If you use Access Connections this is most likely the reason.