Monday, May 21, 2012

WinXP: Cannot browse LAN resources (share/printer) or Workstation service won’t start

 

Imagine: you still have an old box running Windows XP bound to your local network. One day you start the box and see the surprise: you can surf in internet, send and receive mails, chat and skype – but you have no access to the local network resources (like server shares or network printers).

Double click on the icon Network –> Microsoft Windows Network opens an error message “The network is not present or not started.”.

You may try the fix from MS knowledge base - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/170336/en-us

If it won’t help: go to services control panel applet and check if the workstation service is started. Probably not. This is the reason.

Try to start it: if the service won’t start – look at the error message. You may receive following error message:

Error 126: The specified module could not be found when starting a service

The possible reason is described here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/959077.

´The registry on your machine is damaged by a virus and contains unsuitable entry in the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ lanmanworkstation\parameters\ServiceDll

pointing to a Trojan library module (in our case – aptwanxok.dll). The enemy library may be already removed from your machine, but the registry key is still pointing to it and requires to load blocking start of the service due to missing module.

Replace the entry with

%SystemRoot%\System32\wkssvc.dll

image

restart the computer and enjoy!