We're running several services in our company using a shared domain account. Unfortunately, the credentials for this account are widely distributed and being used frequently for both service and non-service purposes. This has led to a situation where it is possible that the services will be temporarily down due to this shared account being locked.

Obviously, this situation needs to change. The plan is to change the services to run under a new account, but I don't think this goes far enough, as that account is subject to the same locking policy.

My questions is this: Should we be setting up the service accounts differently than other domain accounts, and if we do, how do we manage those accounts. Please keep in mind that we are running a 2003 domain, and upgrading the domain controller is not a viable solution in the near term.