I've got DNN 4.7 up and running under Windows Authentication and it works OK for me because I created my own user ID before I switched it over to AD authentication. But now of course, DNN won't create new users when they first visit the site based on their AD creds. I've tried the AD provider and can't get it working so I'm thinking it might be easier to just enable anonymous login in IIS and use the ASP.net user creation functions to create a new account when a new user visits the site.

Has anyone done that? It seems like a pretty simple solution but using Windows Authentication, I'm thinking it'll try to create a new domain user, right?

I've moved your posts to the Authentication forum so that I can get notifications on when you reply.

What errors were you getting with using the AD Provider? Have you gone through the documentation that you can download from the project page?

I guessing you were getting the IIS login popup. Did you try entering your username as Domain\Username or moving the site into your Trusted SIte in Internet Options? The documentation for the provider can be found on the under the project downloads or there's a couple of links in this post (http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/89/threadid/141701/scope/posts/Default.aspx) that have instructions for pre DNN 4.6.0 but are quite close.

As for uncommenting <Authentication mode="Windows"/> in the web.config see my post towards the bottom of this thread (http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/89/threadid/144519/scope/posts/Default.aspx). While it may in a general sense be simpler to procede like you mention things are rarely simple in the DNN world. If you look at the source code you'll see that there is a lot that goes into actually creating a user and even the current AD provider doesn't do a complete job of it in all cases and that's something I've been working towards rectifying since I took over the project.