Jools Posted August 21, 2007 Share Posted August 21, 2007 Bit of a weird problem with my brother's computer cropped up tonight. He's running XP Pro and seems to have lost access to almost everything. Whenever he tries to run something, be it IE, Add/Remove programs, viewing the desktop properties he keeps getting a box pop-up saying something to the tune of "cannot access path - you may not have permission to run this program". Few things are working mostly Zone Alarm and MSN Messenger, and the ability to browse the C drive, but pretty much everything else is unaccessible. Booted into safe mode just so I could run things and in Safe mode everything works fine. Checked msconfig for the startup files but there's nothing suspicious there. Hijackthis, Spybot S&D and AVG all came back with nothing found. System restore is also turned off so that's a no-go. In normal mode, when I click the link on the start menu to Set Program Access and Defaults instead opening that window it just asks me if I want to make a shortcut to the desktop. Even if I do the shortcut does nothing. While in safe mode I can access this window, but even if I set everything to Microsoft Windows it changes straight back to custom right after. So I'm at a bit of a loss.. cant seem to find any dodgy programs, spyware, hijackers or viruses.. I've scanned pretty much every corner of his C drive, emptied the temp folder, cleared out the temp internet files, anything that might be holding some nasty little program but it hasn't fixed it. What else can I try? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavsta Posted August 21, 2007 Share Posted August 21, 2007 He has not accidentaly made his local account a restrictive user account instead of a Admin by any chance? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jools Posted August 21, 2007 Author Share Posted August 21, 2007 Nah that was one of the first things I looked at once I got into safe mode as thats what it actually looked like. In safe mode his account still shows as the admin, but when you boot up normally it is as if he is a restricted user. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mannin Posted August 21, 2007 Share Posted August 21, 2007 try to boot into safe mode, then remove Zone Alarm. boot back into normal mode, it should all be working again. then reinstall ZA if you ant to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jools Posted August 22, 2007 Author Share Posted August 22, 2007 Cheers Mannin, everything is back to normal now Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.