I noticed when password protected sharing is turned off (for sharing files between PCs) that the Guest account appears. The Guest account then disappears when password protected sharing is turned on. Please explain this behaviour since I thought there wasn't an active Guest account in Windows 10?

You can check the presence of the Guest account by clicking on the user account logo in Start, by running net user guest or from a Belarc Advisor report.

Maybe there is a meant to be a hidden Guest account used to enable file sharing between PCs which is not meant to be displayed?

I have long used Password Protected Sharing on my network; however Win 10 seems to keep changing, on its own, settings in several areas, whenever there is a major update--and now I think it wants me to use a home group instead of PPS. (This may be because one of the computers on my network accidentally got set up with a home group, and it pushed another computer to join??) So I first went searching for any article that would give me an analysis of the virtues and downsides of using a home group vs. password protected sharing--and I could find NOTHING on this. That really surprised me. So...

1) Am I not better off and more secure with PPS than with a home group, and is there anyplace where I could find an analysis of this issue, and these two choices, or can anyone provide one?

2) Has anyone else noticed this annoying behavior of Win 10 to ignore the settings one has set, and replace them with different settings with an update? (I also found this happening with power settings sometimes.) I understand and expect that this will happen if there is a complete reinstall of the OS, and maybe I understand some items being changed with an in-place upgrade, but I am sometimes finding settings being changed--with no warning!-- in a way that seems unreasonable. Is there any way around it?

Thanks,
Michael

Thanks, once again, Brink, for all the help you give.

Re: Q1) Yes, thanks, that helps to know. I was surprised not to find any discussion of this question.

Re: Q2) Microsoft seems to have really taken the attitude more and more that the O/S is theirs, and the user is just "borrowing" it. This is very unfriendly to the user, and may yet drive me away from Windows. Have you seen any discussion among Insiders about this--whether they intend to return control more to users as they get Win 10 established, or is it our destiny that the days of being in control of your own Windows computer are gone?
(I signed up as an Insider, but have had no time at all to participate in those forums.)

Michael

I was going to post to a new thread, but in doing a quick search on PPS on the forum, I found that I had posted a similar issue on this thread late last year, and Brink replied.

As stated previously, I have long used Password Protected Sharing on all our computers, and this has mostly worked very well with our network. The other day, while trying to set up a new backup program on my wife's computer, I found that I could not get access to another computer on the network--it appeared the program refused my credentials. I thought it was a program glitch of some sort and was preparing to write to their support to find out what I was doing wrong. I forget even to check if I could get network access to the other computer with Explorer.

Then last night, I tried to get access to my wife's computer from another with Explorer--and same error. It took a while to figure this out (after questions to my wife about whether she had changed anything) that she had been pushed by MS to register a Microsoft password on her computer, which she started to do, then apparently got cold feet and failed to verify. However, it looks like in the process MS actually changed the USER ID on her computer. Essentially, her User went from being identified as her FIRSTNAME, to being identified as FIRSTNAME LASTNAME. Her USER folders still seem to be under a folder called FIRSTNAME (plus, I had moved the USER folders to another drive with the permitted method, under a new folder called FIRSTNAME Files), but on the network, while the computer itself has the same name as before, it looks like her USER is now identified as FIRSTNAME LASTNAME, and she is confused about what credentials and password to use where--plus I can no longer get easy access between these computers. (However, note that I also have a USER with my name on our computers, so I had no trouble getting access from my USER on my computer to her computer.) The problem occurs when trying to use her USERNAME.

My current solution is to just do a System Restore to a few days ago before she encountered the tangle with MS, but I am really trying to understand what happened, since if MS gets their tentacles into her (or my) USER credentials again, I want to know what options I have for making things work properly. Any help with clarification would be appreciated, plus I'm trying to find out if this is a known issue.

Thanks,
Michael