I recently had an end user of one of my clients report that they couldn’t login on their machine. The machine in question is a Windows 7 Pro x64 laptop, connected to an Active Directory controlled domain. The exact error message read, “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.”

I remembered seeing this error in the past and coming up with a fix, but couldn’t quite remember the steps. So, I began some quick research to find the right plan of action. I found a few sites that were of great help to lead me in the right direction. The most obvious fix was to login to the computer using a local administrator’s account. However, my particular case was a bit different since I support this client remotely.

To work around this, I had the user disconnect from the network and login with their most recent domain password. That way, the machine would be forced to use the stored login credentials without trying to verify the trust relationship with the domain controller. The user was able to login this way, then connect to the network so we could do a remote session.

At this point, I was able to create a local user with admin privileges, log off, remove the user’s original domain account from the machine and add it back in (with a changed password) verified by the domain controller. The profile loaded correctly and all was right again.