Workstation and Computer Broswer services failed to start

[alanp]

Hi all,

A few days ago, I started to experience a strange problem on one of my computers running Vista - I could no longer access other computers' network shares, but others could access this computer like usual.

I tried reinstalling the NIC, updating the driver, etc, but the problem persists...

And then, I found in the event log, that the Workstation and the Computer Broswer services has both failed to start.. the relevant log entries are as follows:

The Computer Browser service depends on the Workstation service which failed to start because of the following error:

The dependency service or group failed to start.

The Workstation service depends on the SMB 2.0 MiniRedirector service which failed to start because of the following error:

The dependency service or group failed to start.

The SMB 2.0 MiniRedirector service depends on the SMB MiniRedirector Wrapper and Engine service which failed to start because of the following error:

SMB 2.0 MiniRedirector is not a valid Win32 application.

The SMB 1.x MiniRedirector service depends on the SMB MiniRedirector Wrapper and Engine service which failed to start because of the following error:

SMB 1.x MiniRedirector is not a valid Win32 application.

The SMB MiniRedirector Wrapper and Engine service failed to start due to the following error:

SMB MiniRedirector Wrapper and Engine is not a valid Win32 application.

So the problem seem to have originated from this "SMB MiniRedirector" thing, which I have no idea what it is...

I would also like to point out that these errors are all hidden inside the event log and not explicitly shown to the user. If I haven't tried to run "net view \\somepc" in the command prompt, I wouldn't have known at all. (That command returned an error "The Workstation service has not been started.")

Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this?

This computer is usually powered on all the time (downloading the Internet), the only time I've restarted it was when asked to do so by Windows Update, and I haven't been installing anything funny on it either...

Update:

I fixed the problem by replacing all the SMB related system files (from my other Vista computer; they're all in the "winsxs" folder, just search for "SMB" to find them). No idea how they broke themselves the first place...

Edited January 21, 2008 by alanp