Odd naming issue - XP local machine name

[MrJDH]

Hello. If someone could offer to shine some light on this, I'd be very grateful, as it's really puzzling me.

Ok. One of our computers is named S16-26. Despite this being the case, the local machine name displayed within the 'log on to' section of the logon dialog box, is not 'S16-29', but instead 'USER-and then a load of random numbers.
The really annoying thing, is that this random name also shows as being the computer account name within AD.

I've dropped the computer off the domain completely, and then trashed the computer account within AD. Rejoining the machine to the domain afterwards, still didn't resolve the name issue.

I did think I'd managed to crack the issue yesterday, when I read a post that suggested ensuring that 'S16-29' was showing as the correct value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\DefaultDomainName. The value wasn't correct, so I amended this value from the random name, back to 'S16-29'. To my disgust, I noticed that when attempting to log on again locally, the name had reverted back!

Has anyone come across this issue before, and if so, how did you resolve it?

Many thanks.

[glen_j]

we've had a couple of xp machines do that, we ended up changing the name by putting an a at the end ie ours were af7-02 so we changed it to af7-02a and it changed everything correctly. changing the name back however didn't work so we've just left it with an "a" on the end

[MrJDH]

Hmm. Interesting. Thanks for the reply - wondering if anyone has a permanent, correct solution.