I have a PC running Windows XP Media Center 2005. I recently purchased a Media Center Extender for the XBOX and played around with it this weekend.

So far I am impressed with it and everthing works 100% except for one thing: I found it immposible to get the extender to find the other PC's on my network with content such as music, movies, pictures etc. Whenever I asked it to add folders on another machine, it only found the shares on the MCE 2005 machine. After a bit of thought, I came up with using a login script to map drives under that users profile apon logon.

After a bit of looking around I realised that the extender runs under a user MCX1 on your MCE 2005 machine and all the nessesary information stored under that users profile. Seeing as the password for this user is unknown you cannot login to the MCE 2005 machine with this account to set everything up as you can with other users.

There are two ways to execute a login script when a user logs on. One is via a local policy which will apply to all users logging onto the MCE machine either locally or via a remote desktop session, which is exactly what the extender does each time you connect to the MCE 2005 machine.

The other is to create a share and point each user to a login script in that share which is what I am going to explain here. Create a folder called netlogon on your hard drive somewhere and share it making sure the share name is netlogon. Create a logon script called login.bat and place it in that share. In this file you're going to map the files and since most MCE machines are stand alone and not in a domain you need to pass credentials to the remote machine in order to map the drive.

Here is an example:

net use x: /delete /yes

net use x: "\\server\sharename" /user:domain\accountname password

If the machines are not joined to a domain then use the remote machines name as the domain in the above example. Also note the double quotes around the \\server\sharename. You only need those if your shares have a space in the name. You can map any number of shares in the script if you want.

1. Go to Computer Management on the MCE 2005 machine.
2. Go to Local Users and Groups and then Users. Find the MCX1 user account (you may have more than one MCX account if you have multiple extenders).
3. Click on the Profile tab, in here you should see a path entry for a logon script. Specify just the file name in the logon script (login.bat) under the profile tab for the account. The operating system assumes that the script will be in the netlogon share and then executes the script when the account logs on.
4. If your extender is connected, restart it.

When you start up the extender you should now be able to browse content in the shared folders on the remote machines other than your MCE 2005 machine.

Obviously you can use this same method with the normal user that you use on your MCE machine.

Enjoy!