Non Privileged Administrator ??

Problem: The user reported that she was no longer able to access any of her files on her (XP Pro) system. I asked if she was able to logon. She said no; she told me that she had been logging on without a password and that now her userid was requiring a password, which of course, she didn't know. I had her hit Ctl+Alt+Delete 2 times to show the logon prompt, and logon as Administrator (I assumed that the Admin account had no password either; it didn't .... :o)

Now here's where it gets weird: I asked her to check the user accounts to see if her regular account had administrative privileges. She went to the User Accounts dialog and reported that her regular account was not even listed. Furthermore, she reported that the only user listed was Administrator and that it was designated a "Guest Account"!!! We then went to the Computer Management dialog to check the Local Users and Groups. Believe it or not, the Administrators group was not in the Group list! Now THERE'S something you don't see every day. This was major corruption of some sort so I decided to have her get out the XP install CD and run Setup to do a Repair. I walked her through that whole process successfully, but when she logged onto the newly repaired system we found that nothing had changed; the repair option didn't fix the Administrator account.

Solution: I had her run Setup again, but this time install a fresh copy of XP onto the same partition, making sure not to overwrite anything. She was then able to logon to the new system and take control of her files.

Never fool yourself into thinking you've seen everything ......

The Enigma Called Outook Express

Problem: The user reported that she could not see all of her IMAP folders in Outlook Express. I asked how she knew that some were missing. She said that she had accessed her business email from home and had created some new folders on the server, so she knew they were there, but Outlook Express at work didn't show them. I was able to logon to the email server with another email client, and sure enough saw the new folders.

Solution: I selected the mail server in her folder view and displayed the synchronize page. Next to the Synchronize button there's an IMAP button which shows the IMAP folder configuration page, where All folders are listed under one tab and Visible folders are listed under another tab. As you might have guessed, the lists were the same, and neither list had the new folders. The buttons to the right of the lists are named Show (to show hidden folders), Hide (to hide visible folders) and Reset List. The Reset List button causes OE to go out to the server and refresh the list of All folders. After the "All" list was refreshed, the new folders were there and I was able "Show" them on the "Visible" list.

Cumbersome, but par for the course in this imperfect world ruled by email ....

Black Screen of Death

Problem: The user reported that her Win 2000 machine would not boot to Windows; it stops at some DOS window (?). Anyhow, the boot sequence was stopping shortly after reading the default boot device and then hanging with at Trap 00000006 message; the background of the screen was black. The message also had some flags and Hex code that didn't look familiar to me.

Solution: Rather than hurt my brain trying to figure these things out, I always search the internet to see if anyone else has seen the problem. I'm always amazed at how many times I find a good hit. This time I found a solution by the good people at the Betaone forum. They say "the problem is the result of a corrupt NTLDR file." Their recommendation (I'll give my abreviated list):

1. Load the Win 2000 CD and go into the Recovery Console
2. Run chkdsk /r
3. cd back to the root of the C: drive
4. Ren NTLDR to NTLDR.old
5. Copy D:\i386\NTLDR C:\NTLDR

It worked for me. Thanks, FOX!

Broken Record

Problem: Well it happened again. That's right, somebody didn't heed my repeated warnings to BACK UP YOUR DATA!! This time the person had all her valuable data stored on a flash drive and the thing just died. It's a good thing I'm almost bald. There's not much hair left to pull out.

Solution: Sorry, there is no solution. I can only hope that repeating these sad stories will finally sink in. Who am I kidding? I'm the only one reading this.....

Oh well, Ron, if you're listening, do backups!!
ref:(http://kelleyron.blogspot.com/2004/10/gambling-with-your-data.html)