A network error has occured

I'm having a very unusual problem at work. We're having several computers which are having problems logging onto the NT4 domain. The exact error message that it's giving them is:
"A network error has occured. Please try your request again later. "
So far, the only people who have reported this error have been Win 9x clients when they are attempting to logon. Does anyone have a clue as to where I may be able to find out what's causing this problem?
Here's a few other little tidbits of information:

1. Normally let's people log on after 5 - 20 attempts. After an unsucessful logon (where the user does use the correct password, but gets the error above) it does not "clear" the password field. It does not appear that the password request is being rejected by the PDC since we have it set to lock out accounts after 3 unsuccessful logons.

2. We have one other BDC and have had a few that we have taken off line. However, when looking up the network security authenticator in the registry, several of the people who are having the problem are being authenticated by the PDC.

3. I just finished diagraming our network all the way to the desktop level and the problems are spread across the network and are not limited to any one segment, hub, or switch. I just finished doing some load balancing on the network, so network traffic doesn't appear to be a problem for most of the people. I wouldn't rule out network traffic 100% since I'm not a network guru and there are several things that I don't know.

4. It is normally the same people time and time again who have problems. On the worst ones, they receive errors when attempting to change their domain passwords and then are unable to log in at all. We then have to go in an administratively change thier passwords to enable them to function at all.

If anyone has any ideas on this I'd be very grateful!
Thanks,
Jeff

 

My first idea with 9X PCs (and especially 95) and strange issues is to clean up the 95 PC before even thinking what else might be a problem.

Clean up as in
- remove all the filennnn.chk files from the root folder
- make sure the root folder isn't anywhere near maxed out on total number of files. I'd stay below 300 in c:\ itself just for safety
- remove all temp and temporary internet files
- remove all cookies
- empty the recycle bin
- either boot to safe mode or CAD and stop all processes except Explore and Systray if it's running
- scandisk, standard and fix all errors
- defrag (ignore 95 saying you don't need to).

If that doesn't fix things up then some network details. A rough guess at the total number of shares on the network and any specific event log error messages from the DCs involved when the authentication failures occur.

 

Profiles causing network problems?

Thanks for your reply. We normally keep our machines pretty clean as we have had several problems with them since they are so old, so the cleanup wasn't too difficult, but unfortunately it didn't take care of the problem. One thing that we did notice though, is that the problem only occurs whenever certain users are logging on to the computer. When we log on as network administrators (or anyone else for that matter) it lets us right in and doesn't give us any problems (even though it gives problems everytime for the user). Since it appears to be limited to the user on this computer, could there be something corrupted in the users profile that is causing this? That would be fairly easy to rebuild, and may be worth looking into.
As to your questions about network shares and error messages, we probably have around 200 network shares all across the network. I searched the PDC to find any unusual error messages in the event viewer, it just showed when people were locked out or logged on and didn't show anything during the times when it gave the error message.
Thanks!
Jeff

 

See what Newt says.

It might be just the user.

Or it might be the user's latency and a WHOLE BUNCH of NetBIOS traffic. That's a lot of shares.

How many protocols are your running?

 

jscroggs - easy enough to test the user profile by having that user log on to another PC. If the problem follows the user, then there is something about the account causing the problem. Otherwise I'd take a very careful look at the network connection for any problem PCs. Patch cables and patch panel punch downs and such like. Also consider the total number of shares the user has mapped - and maybe set to only connect when the share is needed. That way there is less overhead at logon time.

The reason I asked about total number of shares is that 95 (98 too but not as easily) can get very confused by information overload on a large network. We had a similar issue about a year ago and finally had to remove comments from a bunch of shares to stop the problem. Oddly enough, only 95 PCs had the problem but only some 95 PCs.

If you have long share names and tend to put in comments about the shares, you might want to consider doing something similar. We have a script that automatically builds a personal share for each new user on our central file server. The script was originally written to append a comment - something like "personal network folder" to each of these shares. Deleted that piece of the script and blanked out the comment on a bunch of existing shares and no problems since then.

I did find it interesting that some folks are routinely validated by the PDC though. That shouldn't normally happen unless the BDC on that network segment is busy. We see some similar happenings at the beginning of each shift - and especially 1st shift when huge numbers of folks are starting up and logging on at the same time. But it isn't causing problems so we've held off adding a 2nd BDC to the business LAN. If you do have users who are validated by the PDC even at low activity periods, something is wrong with the way those accounts are set up.

 

I've seen this kind of problem in a network where the clients had the ability to advertise shares... ...and all of them did. Turning off file and print services for the clients fixed the problem.

On one network, instead of declaring a share for each individual user, there is one share for all users. Users' personal directories in that one share are protected with NTFS permissions. Users have a shortcut on their desktops that takes them to their personal folder and not to the root of the share.