I was troubleshooting some local Windows XP user permissions issues, and wanted to see what groups my local user was a member of. I went to Computer Management – Local Users – Users – UserAccountInQuestion – Properties – Member Of, and received a message stating
“The workstation service has not been started”
I was unable to view group membership.
I opened services.msc and saw the workstation and server services were missing. After doing a bit of research I found out that was due to the Client for Microsoft Networks and File and Printer Sharing not being installed.
I installed the Client for Microsoft Networks, and the workstation service appeared, was set to automatically start, and was started.
I installed the File and Printer Sharing, and the server service appeared, was set to automatically start, and was started.
I was then able to view the user’s group membership. All this information is pretty easy to find on the Internet, but while searching for it I did find a very interesting post by Jason Hartman that describes the Registry keys and .dlls these services depend upon. Most of his information deals with Great Plains software, but the underlying Windows info was pertinent to anyone troubleshooting server or workstation service troubleshooting.
Some of his more interesting notes:
Verify the wkssvc.dll (workstation service) and srvsvc.dll files exist in %systemroot%\system32 directory and are not 0 bytes in size. Many comments to this post note that antivirus programs can wreak havoc with these files.
Verify the existence of the following registry keys:
For workstation service:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\system\currentcontrolset\services\lanmanserver\ServiceDLL\%systemroot%\system32\wkssvc.dll
For server service:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\system\currentcontrolset\services\lanmanworkstation\ServiceDLL\%systemroot%\system32\srvsvc.dll
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