Disable Windows NT/W2K/XP Hidden Administrative Shares

The system automatically creates hidden “administrative shares” for its
logical drives C:, D:, and so forth which it names C$, D$ and so forth. It also
creates the admin$ hidden share for to the \winnt folder. These shares are
designed for remote access support by domain administrators. By default, if you
delete these admin shares, they will be recreated when you reboot. To disable
permanently so they will not be recreated on the next reboot, use the following
Windows NT / Windows 2000 / Windows XP registry hack:

Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Key: SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanManServer\Parameters
Name:
AutoShareServer for servers
Name:
AutoShareWks for workstations
Type:
REG_DWORD
Value: 0

For background: Q156365.
For details on disabling in Windows XP, see Q314984. In Windows 2000 and Windows XP, you disable the
shares via

• Start
  
• Settings
  
• Control Panel
  
• Systems Tools panel
  
• Shared Folders
  
• Double-click the Shared Folders branch to expand it
  
• Click Shares
  
• In the Shared Folder column, right-click the share you want to disable
  
• Click Stop sharing
  
• Cick OK.

NOTE: If you disable an administrative share that you
have created, it will not be automatically enabled after you restart your
computer, and you will need to recreate the share.

Perhaps the best approach to protect hard drive resources on workstations is
to disable the server service if you can. There are a few workstation
applications that need server service running, in particular, some SNA emulation
packages.