Windows Fax and Scan - An error has occured please try the operation later or contact your administrator.
Dear Forum, I am experiencing an issue under Windows Vista Premium running Windows Fax and Scan. We are running a Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain, with Vista and 7 work statations. The machine that I am having issues with is Vista Premium and the user that is logged in is Domain Administrator. We can open the Fax and Scan application and we can view the default window. We are given the warning at the bottom advising that no accounts are setup. We click on Tools > Fax Accounts and click the add button. We get to the choose a modem name point and leave the default value "Fax Modem" and click next. At this point we get the error message - An error has occurred please try the operation later or contact your administrator. We are also not able to open the Fax Settings, you click on Tools > Fax Settings and nothing happens - unsure whether this is because no fax account is configured? If we log onto the machine as local Administrator then we can function fine and the Fax and Scan application works as it should showing all account details and settings. Therefore this suggests to me that it is something account/permission based? In relation to this and to provide some background information we had an issue with our Server 2008 over the December period and the server had to be rebuilt. Therefore all workstations had to have their relationships re-established with the server. Since doing so all the user accounts including the domain administrator account when logging into any particular machine have had another user profile folder created. For example Administrator.Domain in C:\User has been replicated and another folder Administrator.Domain000 now exists, and this is the same for all users. This has not posed any real issues as we just copied in all the relevant files and e-mails into the new user folder and setup the apps to point at the right place, etc. I have done some searching on the forums, and have come across a few things about checking registry strings for HKey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Sell Folders and checking the entries and all seem fine. I have also tried a few command line commands such as takeown /f C:\windows\system32\logfiles\wmi\rtbackup and cacls C:\windows\system32\logfiles\wmi\rtbackup /G administrators:F as mentioned in some other posts, but to no avail. I have un-installed and re-installed Windows Fax and Scan and uninstalled and re-installed the modem driver (US Robotics 56K PCI). I have checked permissions on the fax application and checked that the Domain Admin is part of the local admin group etc, but again to no avail. Ideally we want to get this to work under a user account rather than an admin account, but we have the same issues with the users. Our thinking was if we can get it to work under domain administrator then we should then be able to then get it to work under the domain user account. Can anyone help or suggest a better method of troubleshooting as to why this is happening? If you need any further information please let me know? Thank you in advance, James
January 20th, 2011 6:25pm

Hi, Will this happen to other user account or other Vista? Create a new account and test on anotehr system to check the result Regards,Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.
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January 26th, 2011 12:57pm

Hi, The issue is based just around one account running under Vista, local admin is ok, but domain admin is not. We are going to try a few more things this week and will come back to this thread either to close it or with a request for further help. Regards, James
February 1st, 2011 12:59pm

I have the same problem with no solution yet. I tried everything but nothing works. As a last attempt I can do is delete the user profile and recreate it, 'unfortunately. Here is the solution that worked for me. has been found here: http://help.lockergnome.com/vista/account-wizard-error--ftopict62696.html Proposed fix: 1) Turn off WFS 2) Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fax\Accounts, delete all the sub keys. Mine looked like "S-1-5-21-#########..." 3) Run WFS elevated the first time--this should allow it to recreate appropriate accounts.
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March 8th, 2011 1:45am

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