User Account Gets Locked Out When It Should not Get Locked Out

• Microsoft Windows NT Workstation version 3.51
• Microsoft Windows NT Server version 3.51

SYMPTOMS

After your user account has been locked, then unlocked, Windows NT locks you out again after you log on once more.

This problem occurs when the Windows NT domain has the Account Policy configured to lockout user accounts after three bad password attempts.

To illustrate the problem, suppose a user logs on, logs off, gives three bad passwords so they get locked out. The system Administrator unlocks their account. The user logs on, logs off, logs on again but can't because they are locked out again. It should default back to the account policy of three bad logon attempts at this point, but it doesn't.

CAUSE

The bad password count information for your user account fails to get written to the Security Account Manager (SAM) database.

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, ask your administrator to delete and recreate your user account and reassign all your domain privileges to your new account.

NOTE: When your administrator recreates your account you to lose your assigned access privileges on the domain because Windows NT assigns each new user account a new security identifier (SID) regardless of whether or not the account name matches a previous account name.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Windows NT version 3.51. This problem has been corrected in the latest U.S. Service Pack for Windows NT version 3.51 and Windows NT 4.0. For information on obtaining the Service Pack, query on the following word in the Microsoft Knowledge Base without the spaces):

   S E R V P A C K