Terminal Service Error: Specified Domain Does not Exist

Written on May 27, 2010  |  by RP Mickler  |  Leave a Comment Leave a Comment  |  Bookmark and Share

I had a situation yesterday that was interesting. On a Windows 2008 Server running Remote Desktop Services, users attempting to use RDP into the box would intermittently get an error at login that read like: “The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted.” This prevented a clean login to the box. This wouldn’t happen all of the time – just some of the time – which made it kind of irritating.

The circumstances were similar to this article from Microsoft. So, I applied the registry hack it described to the 2008 server.

  1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
  2. Locate the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server
  3. Click Edit, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
  4. In the New Value #1 box, type IgnoreRegUserConfigErrors, and then press ENTER.
  5. Right-click IgnoreRegUserConfigErrors, and then click Modify.
  6. In the Value data box, type 1, click Decimal, and then click OK.
  7. Quit Registry Editor.
This solved the problem. Users could then cleanly log-in.
R

WA_CC says:

Commented posted on: October 24, 2011

LIFE SAFER!!!

This has been bugging me for 2 days!!!!