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 ......