I have read dozens of articles and threads, many on this very forum, to try and get WMI queries to run on our Thin Clients (the XPe SP3 machines). The query would usually return either "The RPC Server is unavailable" or "The remote server machine does not exit or is unavailable", depending on the vbscript running the WMI query. After days of trying every suggestion I ran across, the only success I've had so far was after changing the remote RPC service to Log On as 'Local System account' instead of 'This account: NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService'. While that's a step in the right direction (I think), I don't think the network team is going to be ok with changing a global policy on the 300-400 thin clients, my understanding is that running a service as a 'Local System account' is less secure. Incidentally, the wmi query works fine on all our machines that are not XP SP3 (which the thin clients happen to be), and as you may have guessed, running the query locally on the machine works fine -it's just won't work remotely. My intention is to use WMI and the Win32_PNPEntity class to compile a list of all the hardware on our thin client machines. -and wouldn't you know it, it works fine on everything but the thin client machines (and a few non-thin clients that I suspect might either have the same XP SP3 security settings or possibly have the same global policy for some reason). I guess what I am looking for are some suggestions as to why the remote RPC service works fine when switched to 'Local System', but ignores WMI queries when set to ''This account: NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService".

Well, maybe it doesn't matter. I think they are going to go ahead and just change them all to have RPC run as Local System afterall. What are the security issues with this exactly?

Yeah that didn't work when applied to a machine that hadn't been testing on at all. Which means to me, it must be RPC as LocalSystem AND something else I did thats makes it work, and not just RPC running as LocalSystem by itself. Now to figure out which other modification I made needs to be made again... there were only like 30 of them....