I use WebDAV to manage some things on my website and it’s been working nicely with Windows XP’s Web Folders support. Recently, I started using my Vista machine more and more and finally decided to upload something directly from my Vista machine and lo and behold Vista refuses to connect to my folder.

Turns out that my web host, dreamhost, like most other hosting providers, only support Basic Authentication and Microsoft conveniently decided that it was unsafe to send passwords in plain text and turned off Web Folder for Basic Authentication mode connections. Well.. it’d been nice if this information was readily provided to us.

Anyway.. much googling around led me to this quick registry hack. (don’t even attempt this if you don’t know how to muck with registries.)

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters “BasicAuthLevel” (REG_DWORD)

the default value of this key is 1. Changing it to 2 and reboot.

Now.. this solution only applies if you can’t connect to your WebDAV folder via HTTP and BasicAuth. HTTPS and BasicAuth still works without the above hack.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.