Cached Credentials with Windows XP
Posted in When you connect to a resource on another machine and supply a username/password, you are given the option to “save password”. It took me a little while to find where these credentials are stored in Windows XP, so I thought I’d share it with you.
The process is slightly different depending on whether or not the logged on user has local admin rights.
Viewing cached credentials – with Admin rights
Viewing cached credentials – without Admin rights
In either case, you will be presented with the following box that allows you to add, remove or modify cached credentials.
One of the issues that I’ve come across at various times in the past is that you can only authenticate to a machine with a single set of credentials. In other words, if you map a drive to \\server1\share1 as UserA, then you cannot map a drive to \\server1\share2 as UserB. You need to use a single user account that has access to both shares.
A while back we needed users to access resources on a server in an untrusted domain (in other words, there was no trust relationship between the two domains/forests). Because the server was in and untrusted domain, users were prompted for a username and password when they tried to access an application stored on the server. We created a generic account in the destination domain so that users could connect to the server and access the application. However, the server was also a file server, and some users needed to access another share with a specific user account that the generic account didn’t have access to. The problem was that the users had already connected to the server with the generic account and had saved the password. This is where being able to remove the saved credentials came in handy. Once we removed the cached credentials of the generic account, we could then have users connect to the server with the specific account and access both the application and the data share.
