At IU, does UITS support Active Directory clients for operating systems other than Windows 2000 and XP Professional?

While Microsoft has provided Active Directory clients for versions of Windows other than Windows 2000 and XP Professional, UITS does not recommend using these clients. This includes dsclient.exe for Windows 95, 98, and Me, and ads.exe for Windows NT 4.0.

UITS will not support these clients for the following reasons:

• The clients provide very little functionality. Primarily, they add only Distributed File System (DFS) client capabilities and the ability to perform LDAP queries, as described in Microsoft Help and Support article 258857.
  
  
• The DFS client (part of dsclient, the Active Directory client for Windows 95 and 98) can cause domain account lockout problems on Windows 95, 98, and 98SE, according to Microsoft Help and Support article 271496. The lockout can occur after only one unsuccessful attempt, regardless of the number of failed attempts the administrator has allowed on the domain. Microsoft appears to have a fix for this, but only through the company's fee-charging support line.
  
  
• UITS is concerned about a version conflict with .dll and .vxd files in these clients and system updates to Windows 95 and 98 computers. A system update may break the Active Directory client and vice versa. This bug is more fully described in Microsoft Help and Support article 283261.

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