My problem relates to a handful (about 5%) of XP Pro workstations on my AD
network. Recently, all the workstations were renamed to a company-wide
nomenclature; the workstations were renamed using the "Change..." button
under Properties in My Computer. All renamed successfully and joined the
domain correctly. They show up in Active Directory under their new names,
and also show up in DNS and WINS with the new names as well.

However, this 5% of workstations cannot be accessed remotely. I cannot
logon to them with Terminal Services, and if I use Computer Management to try
and access their event logs I get the message "Error 5: Access is denied"
(I'm accessing the with the domain's Administrator account). When I check
WINS, these workstations are showing up with their new computer names AND
their old names. I've deleted the old names out of WINS, and even gone as
far as deleting the WINS database and letting the WINS service build a new
database. I've also turned off WINS completely, but that doesn't change
anything.

Even better, if I try to access these workstations with their local
Administrator accounts, I get the same error.

I can only assume there's something on these workstations that is
broadcasting their old names that's getting picked up by Browser, and the
conflict between these old names and the new ones is causing the erors,
although I don't understand how.

I've tried reinstalling XP on a couple of these workstations, but that has
changed nothing. I've not blown out the old XP install and done a complete
install from scratch, but I'm getting to that point. I'd rather not, as
these computers are scatter across Georgia (here's a quick bar bet you can
win: What is the largest (in area, not population) state east of the
Mississippi? Yup, it's Jawja!) and spending a entire week driving around
just to fix a dozen PC's doesn't appeal to me.

I cannot find any commonality among this small handful of computers. I will
add that many of these computers belonged to companies that were bought out
by my company, and so were in different AD's, but that's also the case with
the 95% that are working just fine. And a couple of the "bad" computers have
been in my company's AD from the beginning, so I can't imagine that's the
problem, but I include it for the sake of thoroughness.

Halp!