Mystery user names that start with "\"

  • We've some mysterious entries showing up in the sysusers table in some of our production DBs.

    The login names all begin with a backslash-- as in "\Dsmith".

    These always show with 16 in the status column. The SIDs for these logins do not exist in sys.syslogins.

    They're causing a problem for some scripts that we're using to alter permissions on a large number of servers. We can't track down any reference that shows what they are. We can't seem to remove them; they don't show up in Object Explorer, and neither sp_dropuser or sp_revokedbaccess recognizes them.

    Anybody got any ideas?

  • We found a solution.

    It turns out these are orphaned aliases. The users to which they belonged were dropped, but the aliases remained behind. We got rid of them by executing sp_dropalias in the database to which the alias belonged.

    When running sp_dropalias, you have to leave off the backslash. So, to get rid of "\patty", you'd run:

    exec <dbname>.dbo.sp_dropalias patty

    Hope this helps somebody else who runs into the same issue.

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