Multiple connections error

Question

Trying to access admin$ share on remote machine, I get this error:

Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again.

However, net use reports no entries:

C:\Users\XXXX>net use
New connections will be remembered.

There are no entries in the list.

Can it be that admin$ doesn't exists on remote machine?

Answer 1

If a share does not exist, the server would return "Network name not found". What you are getting now means exactly that: there is another active connection.

It seems that net use only reports explicitly opened connections (net use \\server\share or mapped drives through GUI), but not implicit ones (established by simply opening a file or pipe). Use netstat to see if there are any active SMB connections, and check with Process Explorer for processes that hold open handles to files on network shares.

Answer 2

Again i struggle with this problem... There is lots of variations of this question across stackexchande sites...

So list of ways to deal with this:

1. "Credential manager" to clean old credentials
2. "net use" to list, and "net use * /delete" to remove everything
3. netstat for debugging (thanks @grawity)
4. connect to server by ip instead of it's name

Also, there is this feature, when Windows Explorer first uses local user credentials, allowing to enter correct credentials only if local credentials fail. This can give you quite a headache when server has that user or guest access, but you need to use another username.

UPD. In my cause this behavior was caused by Windows update + legacy Group policy "Enable insecure guest logons". But without this group policy, no connections at all was possible to that server.