What I didn't add in my post was that I deleted the printer and reinstalled it in the new administrator account, AND made it a share. Oops! It still wouldn't work in my original account. I'd print something (as restricted user) to it while the print queue window was open. The file to print would appear and begin spooling, then it would suddenly disappear. That's when I finally gave up and went back to square one.
In XP and below (don't ask me about Vista) you have, via the control panel applet "Users & Groups" to create users AND groups. You can create any damn groups you want to and add any or all users to said group(s).
Nope. When I go to Control Panel the only related option is User Accounts. I even went and ran Control Userpasswords2. When I'd click on a user then try to change group membership from "Restricted" to "Standard" I'd get an error message saying no such group name exists. I can find nowhere where I'm allowed to add/edit/delete groups. Nowhere. I even tried Tweak UI under "Logon". Nothing there to help. I then went to add/remove Windows Components. I searched to see if my installation was short something. Nope. Nothing that jumped out as contributing to this. So no, I can't do all this stuff.
So find your current account directory and right click on a directory or "Folder" and goto properties and find "sharing" Give the restricted account rights said directory (or file or whatever), then log in as that account and access the resource you gave it permission to access.
Nope. As stated above it doesn't work. As for giving rights to users, there's nothing available on the tabs to do that. Oh, I've seen that alright in Windows 2000. I've done it often there. But not here. Sorry.
I have two PC's networked with shared directories and printers. No problem over the network at all. I can print & share files between my Windows XP laptop to my Windows 2000 tower and vice versa. Each has a shared printer attached and each works flawlessly over the network. But the printer attached to this laptop with Windows XP will NOT work in a restricted account. No way no how.
Thanks for the advice, but I've been ahead of what you've told me. I may not have your credentials but I'm not a flake nor a newbie by any means.
Could be a lot of stuff that impeded the printing. It was shared but did the restricted user have permission to print. Maybe something went wrong with the reinstall so printing itself was a problem.
As for where to set security forget control panel, the XP Users thing is junk. Right click My Computer, Manage, then you’ll find the NT style User and Groups that actually gets the work done. Remember XP was before MS decided security was important for non-servers so they didn’t make it easy.
It probably will work but there’s some goofy setting somewhere. Was the restricted account local to the laptop or part of the network? If it’s local to the laptop you’re probably going to run into all kinds of problems with resources on the other machines, though you can (through some annoying UI digging) share an object on one computer to user account local to a different one. It’s a huge pain in the butt and much easier to just use network account but it can be done.
No matter how you slice it security is a big pain in the butt. In newer Windows just dealing with the security is a pain (death to the UAC). In older Windows before MS accepted that security was important the pain is in just setting it up in the first place. I’m not going to nail anybody for flying as admin, for one thing I’m lazy and do it too, it’s just good to remember that it’s not safe and when something bad happens you shouldn’t be surprised, and don’t come around b#$%^ing and moaning about crappy Windows security afterwards.