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Ok, so here’s the deal.  Ever since I switched over from FreeSSHD over to CopSSH, I had gotten this dreaded error.  It has been weeks for me to finally find the stupid resolution.  I had my suspicious on the culprit, but I couldn’t prove it.

It was until just yesterday that I stumbled upon another blogger who also had came across the same scenario as I had. He was also shocked at what it had, but utilized a more devastating approach to resolving it. (http://mattsmee.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/repair-windows-logon-fault/)

Luckily for me, I tend to create several user accounts with admin access incase the primary’s account was ever compromised. All the years of being a sys. admin really pays off, especially in this scenario. I was at least able to get in to my system compared to other techie(Matt) who had to do a full recovery on his system.

The hitting point for me finding out this problem was the third incident on a clean VM I was working with. It inhibited the same errors, with the same software, with just different user accounts. It was at this point I started to tinker a bit.

Taking in the notes that Matt had logged in his experience along with mines, it was definitely that “CopSSH” was the main problem. Although one would follow it to the ‘T’ per its installation instruction, this was probably the down fall of it all.

Ok, here’s the real catch in installing CopSSH and what one should NOT do. The installation instructions are pretty straight forward, till one gets to the screen where it ask the user (you) to utilize an account that has admin access to start the services.

What ever one does, do NOT, I repeat DO NOT use any of the current local admins. Instead, use the default one that is already supplied (which is something like SvcCOPSSH) and just change the password to something one can remember.

Once done with the installation, one must activate a user. I would definitely recommend a different user should be created just for the purpose of logging in via ssh. This is to ensure that no other problems might erupt from this installation.

If done right, one should not encounter this particular error (which in a sense does have some connection to remote users, but not close enough to anything like RDP) and should be on there way to a more secure connection.