A few weeks ago I set up several WebDav shares on my Apache 2.2.9 webserver and protected them with authentication against my LDAP system.

But Windows XP declined to access this shares, stating that username and password do not match even though I provided the correct credentials. The cause of this lies in the new WebDAV implementation which is in place since XP. The new one identifies itself as "Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600" and the older has a user agent of "Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider DAV".

The new implementation insists on prefixing the given username with the FQDN of the server which hosts the share. To prevent it from doing this, you have to invoke the older implementation by appending the port to the FQDN in the connection string.

For example: http://storage.fladi.at:80/shared

This will cause the "Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider DAV" to be called when accessing the shared and this one sends the correct username.

Microsoft Article describing this problem: 315621