Windows XP SP2 "net send/net name" issue

Hi!
I have Windows XP SP2, Messenger service is set to Automatic and is started everytime the system starts.
The problem is I have to restart it on every restart of the system, because the computer name/user name is not displayed when executing the net name command. (I get that no entries are on the list).

After restarting the Messenger service, I get two entries in the net name list:
1-computer name
2-current user name (belongs to Administrators group)
And the net send works fine.

So, it's not an XP SP2 issue because it works on other machine who have the same scenario, and as I said the Messenger service is started on every restart, so why wouldn't it work until I manually restart it?

Thanks!
:wave

 

This sounds like a registry permission (or possibly corruption) issue. Let's check permissions on this key:

Code:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Messenger

And ensure that they are set appropriately. Then, in this key, we want to check that the 'Start' value is set to 2 (should read as 0x00000002 in hex), which represents the 'Automatic' startup.

 

Thank you my friend, I'll check it out.

:wave

 

It doesn't seem to be working...
The value for Start is 2 as you said.

So, what else could it be?

 

If it is indeed set to start automatically in the registry, and it WILL run manually, I could only suspect that something during startup is interfering.

What that is, I don't know. Have you had a look through the event logs for anything related to the messenger service?