Vista Networking Issue

Hello all, I have just now begun having issues with my Vista system after about two weeks of having it installed. I want to mention before hand that everything was working fine, no issues before, networking was perfect and working completely on my network and now it seems the Vista box has a mind of its own and a temper at that..

Continuing, let me explain my network situation so that you can get a grasp of how things are setup. I have 2 routers on my network, 1 is setup to just be a hub (DHCP is disabled, etc.) so that I can have multiple systems in my room without having to be next to the main router.

The main router is in the living room, with 2 computers directly connected to it, and two laptops connected via wireless. Then, has another cable running to my room to the other router, which has two more desktops connected to that.

I assure you this setup works flawlessly and worked perfect until two nights ago. Two nights ago my power went out for about 20seconds and came back up. My main router has an issue with the power going out and wont restart itself without being unplugged and plugged back in. (Linksys at its best..) I woke up to the internet down, all my systems off, etc. Got everything back up and turned on and my personal desktop with Vista on it will no longer let anything connect to it.

Everything on the network can communicate with each other, file transfers are fine, and the Vista box can network into everything else, but, nothing can network into the Vista box anymore. I receive the error:

Login failure: user account restriction. Possible reasons are blank passwords not allowed, logon our restrictions, or a policy restriction has been enforced.

I have not changed any settings on the Vista system, not installed any updates, or hardware changes so this just happening at random is fault to the OS apparently.

I've read around, googled endlessly and have gotten no where with fixing this issue. A lot of people have suggested various solutions which all have lead to nothing helpful or a fix for this issue.

Things I have done so far to try to fix the issue:
- Stop/Restart various system services that are network related.
- Stop/Restart the UPnP services various amounts of times.
- Restored both routers to factory defaults and reconfigured both of them.
- Adjusted the account info on the Vista machine to use a password.
-- Removed the password from the account as it wasn't needed before.
- Checked the hardware to ensure there were no issues.
- Checked the networking settings to ensure everything needed was on.
- Ensured that the firewall was off. (As it was before when it worked fine..)
- Ensured that the Vista machine was able to see everything else on the network. (Which it can.)

After doing the above, I moved into updates, reconfigurations, etc. on the Vista machine. I updated the nic drivers, obtained all system updates for Vista that were not already installed, recreated the network connection, and still no luck.

As I said, the Vista machine can access everything on my network, but nothing can access the Vista machine anymore.

I ran the 'Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool' from Microsoft on every machine on my network and every test passed on all of them. I ran various other UPnP testing tools which all passed on all the machines as well. So I don't see why this issue just started to occur for no reason after a power outage.. My power goes out pretty often and it just now decided to be a pain.

Thanks for any insight and help that anyone can offer in advance.

 

Bump and some more insight to this..

I changed the administrator name on the XP machine (my laptop) and now I get prompted for a username and password when trying to network into the Vista machine instead of it failing immediately due to having the same account names. (Since Windows sends the current user information first.)

However, I shouldn't be prompted for an account/password. And ontop of that the account/passwords don't work that are on the Vista machine. I created a new user specifically to test this issue, named the account test and set the password to abc123 and the account fails to login via the network.

Passworded sharing is turned off on the Vista machine so I don't see why it is asking for a name/password when trying to access it over the network. I've unshared everything, restored original default permissions for everything that were shared, and then reshared a new folder and still the same issue.

The XP machine can't network into the Vista machine no matter what.. This is becoming a real issue as my other desktops harddrive just died so I had to move everything onto the Vista machine and now I can't access it across the network and I need to be able to. (It's gigs worth of work, code, etc. that I need to have accessible and it's not something that will fit on the laptop..)

Any help would be appreciated.