! NEWLY DISCOVERED strangeness. Under desperate testing measures, I changed all users to be members of everything. I FINALLY got remote shutdown to work! The **** ONLY **** way the shutdown was successful was to give the GUEST account to be members of everything. Works great at this point! If you remove any of the names on "members of" list, then it goes back to "access denied". Also, no other user, including newly created users with full group membership or the ADMINISTRATOR will authorize a remote shutdown. This is one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen. I would have guessed that maybe I had a Bad SID, or corrupt user database but the behavior is the same throughout the XP network. This is definately one for the think tank.