I'm wondering whether anyone has previously observed the following behaviour of W2K and whether there are any workarounds client-side or server-side. Win9x and WinNT does not seem to be affected. If you use Windows Explorer's location bar or the "Start|Run..." dialog box, W2K makes multiple authentication attempts to the remote SMB server (checked using tcpdump). These authentication attempts occur in real-time as the user types the SMB address and BEFORE the user has completed the entry by pressing <enter> or similar. Therefore, if the W2K client does not have the user's password cached (eg the Samba server's password is different from the local W2K password), this results in many authentication attempts. If at the same time, the Samba server has the facility to lock a user's account when there are too many concurrent failed login attempts, the userB account would be prematurely locked before the user has a chance to type in the correct password. Under Tru64, there's a custom patch that implements account-locking for Samba (where this behaviour was verified). Under Linux, there is a PAM module called pam_tally which I couldn't get working. I suspect there are similar PAM modules for Solaris and FreeBSD. Has this W2K behaviour been previously noted and are there any known workarounds? Thanks Eddie