Well I made the leap to Windows 7 after having to buy a new laptop (long story short the desktop is dead). Upon upgrading to Win7 RC1, as the laptop came with Vista, my Time Capsule disks stopped working with a mysterious username/password error number 86. I never was able to find out what the hell that meant, but I made an educated guess that Microsoft had disabled some of the old password standards, say NTLM maybe.

That turns out to be the case. These same instructions will probably get Windows XP and Windows 2000 shares to work with Vista and Win7.

Open the Local Security Policy MMC applet, you can do this by searching for Security in the start menu or from the command prompt by typing:

%windir%\system32\secpol.msc /s

Once there open the Local Policies folder, then the Security Options view. From there find “Network security: LAN Manager authentication level” – you will probably find this is set to “Send NTLMv2 response only” – change this to “Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated” – this does lower your security level but is pretty much required to work with anything pre-vista.

Further down you should see “Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) clients” – you may have to make sure that both require boxes there are unchecked as well.

This should get your Time Capsule, Airport Disks, and Pre-Vista SMB/CIFS shares working again!