Handy Utilities for Windows

I don't want to forget about these handy software utilities for doing troubleshooting and debugging on the windows platform.

SpaceMonger is a tool that graphically displays how data is utilized in you hard drive.

SysInternals software...

TcpView essentially provides a graphical view of a netstat on a windows box with a few extra handy features (counting the number of sockets in time_wait, for example).

Procmon allows you to get information about what is happening with a specific process id.

windows account security

The domain (active directory) policy will override any local security setup for a particular account on a server. If the domain security policy says that an account will lock after 5 failed attempts and the local security policy says the account will lock after 3 attempts, the account will lock out after 5 attempts.
Here's the interesting thing:
The account lockout counter is reset every 24 hours or with every passed login attempt. So if you have two services using the same account, one with a correct password and one with an incorrect password, you can likely run indefinitely before the account will lock out. One service will never work and you should get a lot of errors in the security event log.