My user account as administrator recently became corrupted with the result that when I reboot, I am never sure if I am going to have a Start button, taskbar and systray without having to do a System Restore.
The first time this happened, I had a moment of sheer panic when I was locked out of my own machine.

My tip is, right now while you are thinking of it, go to your Control Panel/User Accounts and create a new account with Administrator privileges, because you won't be able to do it if you lose your present profile for any reason.

If you never need to use it - marvellous - but if you do, then it is all set and ready to go simply by switching users. (Press WinLogo key+L)

Cheers

(BTW. I will resolve this as soon as my new backup external HDD arrives, hopefully tomorrow.)

I've been doing that for years now. Not for the exact reason as you, but for similar reasons. But it's a great tip for those that have administration rights on their computers.

Side note: That problem sounds like your hard drive may be going south on you.

When your hard drive comes, you should 1st back up everything on it, just incase.

Hi Walkman.

You may be right but it is a brand new machine with a 200GB SATA Seagate HDD. Still, if it is going to go, better now than further down the track. The problem started after I misconfigured a programme in DOS due to incomplete instructions, but I don't really see how that would affect my profile???

Ran a scannow yesterday and was asked for the installation CD to repair system files but these are on the recovery partition D:.(as well as on C: of course, but these must be corrupted). The registry sourcepath is correctly aimed at c:\windows. Do you think I could redirect that to d:\windows, or just go to SAFE MODE and do a recovery from there? I do have the one allowable copy of the D: drive on disks but the last time I used these, on an XP Home machine, they just went ahead and did a clean install automatically as soon as the first was put in the CD drive so I don't want that at the moment.

Anyway, the machine is running sweetly at the moment so I am doing nothing requiring a reboot until I can get this HDD imaged. I have bought Acronis TI 10 and the USB enclosure will be here tomorrow, so it is just a matter of waiting for the new HDD (hope the Easter hols don't muck up delivery).

Wish me luck

This was an issue with XP that Vista was supposed to fix. Microsoft has always advised that you not use the Administrator account for routine usage. If you're already using it, then rowal5555's advice is very sound!

UPDATE

Woke up this morning to this msg "RTHDCPL.exe. Illegal system DLL Relocation. The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL c:\Windows\Sys32\HHCTRL.OCX occupied an address reserved for windows system DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL."

In the last 4 months I have had two major problems on 2 different machines and in both cases Kodak Easyshare software was implicated. Has anyone else had a problem with this?

Anyway, I have uninstalled Kodak and so far a couple of reboots have been fine. Time will tell I guess but I would appreciate any feedback.

Just so you'll know, I've bought a brand new computer, with an already bad hard drive in it. I took it home,, and it didn't work. I took the hard drive back, and they gave me another new hard drive. I took that one home, ... and the same thing. It was bad. The last time,... I took my whole cpu with me, and I insisted that I see a new hard drive get unwrapped in my face.

Afterwards, I had it installed right then and there, before I left... and it was good...... but the two other hard drives they tested and found them to be bad..... brand new one too... and those were my 1st two out of three hard drives.


I'm still not saying it's your hard drive, but the next one I'd get, I have to see it unwrapped, or it has to come to me factory sealed. If that one is bad too, then I'll know that batch/brand of hard drives are bad.



On the other hand, I've had the Kodak Easyshare (crap) on my computer, doing some work for someone, and I've found that it was doing things like wanting to connect to the internet, and it was making my computer pop up with too many messages that the Kodak Easyshare was trying to access the internet, although I set it to not try to update, .... which means I should never get any messages of it trying to update.... but I always did. I've uninstalled it. I still have the cd, but I don't use it.

That could be your problem, or part of it, but I'm not sure about that. I would get a hard drive from a different source and load it up that way, and see if any problems happen.

You can always go to Wal-Mart and rent you one. You buy one.. keep your receipt.... take it home and test it out........ No matter of the outcome of the tests, purge all the data, wrap it back up in it's original form, then take it back and get a refund.]

Thanks Walkman.

My nearest WalMart would be about 10,000 miles away so a bit far to walk but the new enclosure has just arrived and the HDD is on its way but will be delayed by Easter. The new setup is to image the C: drive and when that is done I'll recheck the system files and repair them if necessary. I'm pretty satisfied that it was the Kodak software that was causing the problem, so with that gone I am much more confident that things will be easy to sort out.

Happy Easter everyone

Thanks for the tip. I made a backup admin account. thanks .

Thanks for the tips. I have made a backup admin account. But how do you copy all the personal settings from the first admin account to the backup admin account ??

See if this helps:
How to copy user data from your Windows XP profile to a new profile

Thanks for the great suggestion, Rob.

Very much appreciated the link, tg1911, but I'm on Vista and can't find the \Documents and Settings folder anywhere, not even under individual usernames, and got no good results from running several different searches, either. I know it's there; I'm sure I've seen it in the past. Oh - also ran several searches in the Microsoft KB. I know you use FF, but are you familiar enough with Vista to help me out? Otherwise, I'll start a new thread in the Vista forum. Thanks!

ETA: Finally found it, after unchecking hide system files & folders (forgot to do that earlier). BUT, I'm denied access and I'm really stuck. This is rapidly turning into a Vista issue, so I'll start that new thread.

ETA a second time: OK, I've now sort of gotten access, so I'll just keep working on it. Man, these permissions changes sure are complicated!

Good tip! I have been using administrator account before, and then, when I got a virus which deleted my registry I couldn't create a restore point anymore, which messed up my computer.

Dang! After a few hours of working on this, I wasn't able to get the user profile copied. Well, at least I have a second admin account; that part was easy.

Great Advice, I've always run admin and never had a problem but never say never.

Hi, I have a question on copying over.

I created a 2nd acct as was suggested in this thread. (Now on start up, it shows the 2 admin accts, which never showed before, and i choose one.)

I read the above link on how to copy over settings from admin1 to newly created admin2.

It says to go to another account other than one being copied from or to.

I noticed there is also a guest account on my system.

So do I need to go into guest account to copy over from admin1 profile account to admin2?

If so, a few questions;

Will I need a password to login to guest.

As far as I know, none of these accounts have passwords.

Do I have passwords on any of these? I didn't set any, and when recieved this computer brought it to techs to load os and copy over some files from old system. I assumed they would have just hit return on the password, as was never given one.

So, if I go to guest, which has no admin capabilites, will it let me do the copy as given above in the link?

and then if my admin1 has a password, how do I find out what it is, to get back into it?

Thanks for your help and wowie on all these awesome tips and tricks!
Thames

I took the advice and created a new Admin account. I've never had another account, so it never stopped while booting to ask which account to log onto. My question is this:
Is there a way to boot straight into my regular account without having to choose which one to log onto?

Go to Start...Run...and type in "control userpasswords2" (without the quotes) and press Enter. Click on your account that you want to automatically log in, then uncheck "Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer", then click OK and reboot to make sure it works.

Thanks, that did the trick.
I know that "control userpasswords2" dialog box must be available somewhere in the Windows GUI, but I haven't found it yet. I believe I've seen it before, but it's not in Control panel, Computer Management, or anywhere else I've been easter egg hunting. Can you please tell me Sergeant Major, where the hell does it hide? Thanks for your help.

AFAIK it isn't anywhere in the GUI. I suspect this is an advanced feature that the programmers didn't want accessible to everyone.

Cool! I'm not here 5 minutes and already I stumble across a helpful tip. Thanks.