I have several Windows 7 clients, freshly imaged and using KMS for activation, that seem to have "fallen off the domain" and back into a WORKGROUP all on their own. Activation was successful and all worked fine before giving the client machines to the users, however, after the user has taken them home, some of them are unable to login and when returned to the IT department it is discovered that the client machine is now a member of the WORKGROUP rather than the domain to which it belonged to when given to the user. There are no helpful events in the log files, and this has only happened to 6 or so computers but is becoming more of a problem as the rollout continues. Of course I assumed it was user error at first, but now with 6 clients, it is clear this is not user error and something else is going on. Can anybody shed some light on this? Our domain controllers are a mix of 2003 and 2008 R2. Our clients are a mix of XP Pro (x86) (which this hasn't happened to) and Windows 7 Pro (x86) - the clients experiencing this issue so far. Currently only laptops that have been removed from our network and taken home have experienced this issue, though not every one. No desktops have this issue as of yet. I hope somebody out there can help. I've been trolling the Internet for answers but haven't come across anything helpful yet.WG

There is no process in place to automatically unjoin a domain and join a workgroup. The only two possibilities that I can think of would be that 1) the user is unjoining the computer from the domain (all you have to have is local admin rights), or 2) the user is performing a system restore to a point where the computer was a member of the workgroup prior to being joined. Visit: anITKB.com, an IT Knowledge Base.

Thank you JM. I didn't think about the system restore possibility. We do have that disabled via GPO though, but perhaps there is somethinig triggering a restore to a previous state. I will look into that in the morning and post back. I thank you for your response.WG