Well I have just butted heads with our domain policy and Microsoft VPC. The summary of the problem is the domain server and your windows PC exchange a secret password, and it’s updated at a random interview (inside a configured window), once the domain server negotiated a new password the old one become invalid. This is fine expect for, when using a virtual PC, where you throw away the changes after each session, which I have been doing as I’m testing my installer, and want it all nice and clean.
There is a registry key option as noted below, but this appears to be required on the server as well as the work station, so the understanding IS guys are not touching it with a barge pole. Which means I’m now rebuilding my VPC image again. Current service pack 2 is been installed, and after that I have ~50 patches for it two install. Yea har!
Anyway, I’ve got a copy of the hard drive image, prior to joining the domain, and I’m going to leave my new image running over the weekends, to hope this is when a new password is exchanged. Otherwise this is the only fly in the virtual machine ointment, which still best the pants of having a ghosted machine.
Here is a VMWare forum discussing the issue (with snapshots) with the registry key been:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\Netlogon\\Parameters\\DisablePasswordChange REG_DWORD 1