I was having a neat little problem where I was unable to login to WSS sites on my development virtual machine. I would keep getting prompted and prompted for credentials even though the credentials belonged to the admins group. This was a particularly painful issue given that some of the web parts were failing with the wonderful “non-specific error.”

After a little scouring I found this little registry hack (Method 1) which fixed the problem:

1. Set the DisableStrictNameChecking registry entry to 1. For more information about how to do this, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   281308 Connecting to SMB share on a Windows 2000-based computer or a Windows Server 2003-based computer may not work with an alias name

2. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
3. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

4. Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
5. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
6. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
7. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
8. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

Curiously the login problem didn’t exist with the Central Admin site.