Saturday, April 23, 2011

DHCP client fails to start- Error 5- Access is denied.

DHCP client not starting Windows 7- Error 5- Access is denied.

Hi,


Today, I faced a pretty strange problem with my HP notebook running Windows 7. I was not able to connect to the wireless network at my friend's home. Initially, I had thought it could be a minor problem which would be resolved once I disable/enable my network adapter and restart my notebook. However, this did not resolve the issue. In the end, I checked if router was configured to use DHCP and restarted the router as well. My problem was still unsolved.

I came back home and opened my laptop. Bummer, my wireless connection was again not working! At this point, I decided to take the troubleshooting to the next step and opened System Event Logs. To my surprise, there were several errors reported by services which failed to start. Some of those services were pertinent to network such as DHCP client and Diagnostic Policy service. I tried to manually start DHCP client service in Service Manager but got the error- Error 5: Access is denied.


After spending some time on Google, I was finally able to resolve the issue. Open regedit and go to HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/services. Right click on services and select Permissions. Assign full control to LOCAL SERVICE and SERVICE users on all subkeys of services key. I restarted my notebook, and yes, all services launched successfully this time and I was connected to the Internet.


Cheers!


JS