Help please. Has my wife b****ered the registry?

[97octane]

Sony Vaio laptop purchased a year ago.
Runs Windows XP Home, with Microsoft Office 2003 Professional (NHS employee license for home use)
We have three users - me (administrator), my wife (administrator), the kids (limited account)
The password for the kids account has been forgotten, so last week my wife changed the password on the kids account.

Ever since then the following have happened;
1. All my internet favourite shortcuts have stopped working. Under Tools, Options, Security, it appears that this is because all of my favourites now show her to be the owner. I have not found a way of changing all of them back to me other than to do each one individually.
2. All Office programs now start very slowly and with at least two adisory notices IN JAPANESE requiring confirmatory OKs before proceeding.
3. Microsoft Outlook will now not remember the passwords to any of my imap mail accounts, and whenever I try to perform any task (eg Send/Receive), it always says that I do not have the required permissions to perform this task

I suspect that my wife has inadvertently done something to the registry. I have tried taking the computer back to 2 previous restore points but this has made no difference. A total scan for viruses (McAfee) has come up negative. I am now at a point that I can't do any more - I once tried altering the registry on another computer and lost it completely - had to re-format the hard drive and start again!!!

Any of the IT crowd here got any suggestions? Much appreciation in advance

Alan

[buggalugs]

97octane said:

Sony Vaio laptop purchased a year ago.
Runs Windows XP Home, with Microsoft Office 2003 Professional (NHS employee license for home use)
We have three users - me (administrator), my wife (administrator), the kids (limited account)
The password for the kids account has been forgotten, so last week my wife changed the password on the kids account.

Ever since then the following have happened;
1. All my internet favourite shortcuts have stopped working. Under Tools, Options, Security, it appears that this is because all of my favourites now show her to be the owner. I have not found a way of changing all of them back to me other than to do each one individually.
2. All Office programs now start very slowly and with at least two adisory notices IN JAPANESE requiring confirmatory OKs before proceeding.
3. Microsoft Outlook will now not remember the passwords to any of my imap mail accounts, and whenever I try to perform any task (eg Send/Receive), it always says that I do not have the required permissions to perform this task

I suspect that my wife has inadvertently done something to the registry. I have tried taking the computer back to 2 previous restore points but this has made no difference. A total scan for viruses (McAfee) has come up negative. I am now at a point that I can't do any more - I once tried altering the registry on another computer and lost it completely - had to re-format the hard drive and start again!!!

Any of the IT crowd here got any suggestions? Much appreciation in advance

Alan

I'm not sure how deleting a different account would have caused this, but anyway -

1) If you're familiar with the command prompt, you can use the 'takeown' and 'cacls' commands to take ownership of and give yourself permissions to a boat load of files at the same time. Or google 'takecontrolof.zip' for an easier to use front end for it.


2) You might have fixed this in 1), otherwise to a re-install via add/remove programs, office 2003, change, repair/reinstall. It will ask you if you just want to repair or just recreate shortcuts or whatever, you want the full re-install.

3) See 2)

One other thing to try is running regedt32 to also reset the permissions on your current user branch, allthough TBH I'm not 100% sure that XP home gives you regedt32 so don't worry if its not there.

Could also try creating a new account for yourself under a slightly different name, if everything's fine it might be easier long to just start using that one rather than mess about with he old one.

HTH
Neil

[97octane]

Many thanks - those look like very useful ideas. I will certainly try the first two. I baulk slightly at trying to do things directly to the registry, so if they don't work, I will probably leave the third option to an expert!!

[stemll]

buggalugs said:

One other thing to try is running regedt32 to also reset the permissions on your current user branch, allthough TBH I'm not 100% sure that XP home gives you regedt32 so don't worry if its not there.

Regedt32 (and regedit) are on XP home. Used to be slightly different programs but not any more.

[bingbong]

You could try using system restore, see this link for more info, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306084. It's relatively straight forward.

[97octane]

bingbong said:

You could try using system restore, see this link for more info, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306084. It's relatively straight forward.

Yup, see above - System Restore did not correct the problem