My wife’s PC occasionally (about once every 3 months) stops playing nice with the other PCs in my house, rejecting file sharing and print requests with an error message ” No more connections can be made to this remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections as the computer can accept.”
The first time I saw this error I was perplexed and somewhat alarmed. XP Home is supposed to have a hard-coded limit of 5 connections, and we don’t have that many PCs in our household. With visions of a horde of hackers (well, a horde of 5 hackers) running amok on the PC, I ran over to pull its network cable, and spent the next hour poring through the Event Viewer and Firewall logs for some indication of how these intruders had broke in. The Event Viewer just had its usual list of generally mundane and often incomprehensible messages. (“The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer.” Good to know!) No viruses reared their ugly heads, and no files proved to be missing or changed. Looks like an inside job, sarge.
Although I usually scoff at those who blame Microsoft bugs for every problem they encounter on their PCs, I’ve come to regard this message as nothing more than a gradual build-up of crud in the Windows connection sharing code. My wife’s PC is used for both printer and MP3 sharing, so connections are frequent and, in a wireless household, sometimes dropped.
Fortunately, there is a quick fix to the problem (assuming you have a way of getting at the PC): just restart the networking stack. The quickest way to do that is to right-click on the system tray icon for your connection and select Repair. If you don’t have a system tray icon, select Control Panel, then Network Connections, and right-click on the item for your network. The “repair” process takes a few seconds, no reboot necessary, and all queued print requests should immediately start printing.
If you Google the error message, you’ll find a lot of theories on the root cause of this error, but none of them seemed to apply to my situation. Perhaps XP SP3 will fix this one, but if not I’ll just keep taking the easy way out.