Kixtart Drive Mappings Disappear on Windows 95/98 Client Computers (247547)

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According to the Kixtart version 3.61 manual (which can be downloaded from the Internet at http://kixtart.to/script/), Windows 95/98 does not provide all the Win32 APIs that Kixtart needs to gather user-specific information such as group memberships. To solve this problem, Kixtart includes two programming methodologies that together allow Windows 95/98 clients to effectively communicate with Windows NT logon servers to process group memberships (among other things).

The first methodology is known as thunking. Thunking allows a 32-bit program to communicate with a 16-bit API and vice-versa. The 16-bit API required by Kixtart is the Netapi.dll dynamic-link library (DLL). According to the manual, the thunking layer that connects this DLL to Kixtart is implemented in the Kx32.dll and Kx16.dll files.

The second methodology is implemented by using Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) with a server-side DLL running as a service on the logon servers (for example, domain controllers) and a client-side DLL running on the Windows 95-based and Windows 98-based computers. This component, according to the Kixtart manual, is used to provide support for advanced features such as domain logon, home drive, group memberships, etc.
If a Windows 95/Windows 98 client is using Kixtart logon scripts to map drives and some of the drives are missing, use the following steps:

1. Install the KxRPC service on all the domain controllers.
2. Install the Kx95.dll file on all the Windows 95/98 clients that are experiencing the problem.
   
   As noted above, Windows 95/98 clients need to have this DLL installed to be able to communicate effectively with the server-side RPC component installed in step 1.

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