Access to Administrative Shares on Vista machines is disabled?

By default remote access to Administrative Shares on Vista machines is disabled due to the fact that Vista uses a Filtered Token when being accessed remotely. Thus even though you may be an admin and you try and connect to \\computername\c$   it doesn’t work.
 

To enable remote access to Admin shares, you can change the registry on the Windows Vista machine so that full credentials are passed between the client computer and the Vista machine during authentication.

How?:
1. Click Start , type regedit in the Start Search box, and then click regedit in the Programs list.
    If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type your password or click Continue.
2. Expand the following subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies
3. Click System, right-click LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy, and then click Modify.
4. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
 

The only Microsoft article that comes close to explaining this is http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=927832

More Info….
The LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy entry in the registry can have a value of 0 or 1. These values change the behavior of the entry as follows:
• 0 = build filtered token. This is the default value. The administrator credentials are removed. These credentials are required for remote administration of the print drivers.
• 1 = build elevated token. This value enables the remote administration of the print drivers on a server within a workgroup.

More articles with some good explanations
http://blogs.msdn.com/vistacompatteam/archive/2006/09/22/766945.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384295.aspx
http://www.jimmah.com/vista/Networking/filtertoken.aspx
 

If you put the following text in a file and name it adminshares.reg you can then import into your registry easily…

 

Matt

KB Keywords:  Vista, c$, d$, admin shares, administrative access, user account control.