Cant access User Accounts XP Home

[Mike]

Working on a laptop for a friend, and she had multiple user accounts setup
and wanted me to delete all but hers.
When i go into User accounts in the control panel it opens up a blank window
with a home, back and forward buttons but that's it.
I tried booting in safe mode and logging in as administrator and get the
same result.
I tried running SFC /scannow to see if any system files had been corrupted
and that didn't help.
Im also unable to open Help and Support for XP.
The system did have a few viruses and spyware. I cleaned it up using
MacAfee's command line scanner and then installed Antivir, Adaware, Spybot,
CWS Shredder and scanned and deleted the appropriate files. Ran another full
system virus scan with Antivir and the system appears clean.
I can browse the internet, but IE hangs when i go to Windows update when it
try's to check for the windows updater tool.
Stumped at the moment and considering starting from scratch. Any ideas?

 

[Menno Hershberger]

Working on a laptop for a friend, and she had multiple user accounts
setup and wanted me to delete all but hers.
When i go into User accounts in the control panel it opens up a blank
window with a home, back and forward buttons but that's it.
I tried booting in safe mode and logging in as administrator and get
the same result.
I tried running SFC /scannow to see if any system files had been
corrupted and that didn't help.
Im also unable to open Help and Support for XP.
The system did have a few viruses and spyware. I cleaned it up using
MacAfee's command line scanner and then installed Antivir, Adaware,
Spybot, CWS Shredder and scanned and deleted the appropriate files.
Ran another full system virus scan with Antivir and the system appears
clean. I can browse the internet, but IE hangs when i go to Windows
update when it try's to check for the windows updater tool.
Stumped at the moment and considering starting from scratch. Any
ideas?

Starting from scratch sounds like a good idea. All the cleaning up has
probably taken its toll on some important components which could be very
hard to track down and fix. I'd suggest a repair installation, unless you
can get all your data backed up in which case I'd wipe it clean and do a
new installation.

 

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

Working on a laptop for a friend, and she had multiple user accounts setup
and wanted me to delete all but hers.
When i go into User accounts in the control panel it opens up a blank window
with a home, back and forward buttons but that's it.
I tried booting in safe mode and logging in as administrator and get the
same result.
I tried running SFC /scannow to see if any system files had been corrupted
and that didn't help.
Im also unable to open Help and Support for XP.
The system did have a few viruses and spyware. I cleaned it up using
MacAfee's command line scanner and then installed Antivir, Adaware, Spybot,
CWS Shredder and scanned and deleted the appropriate files. Ran another full
system virus scan with Antivir and the system appears clean.
I can browse the internet, but IE hangs when i go to Windows update when it
try's to check for the windows updater tool.
Stumped at the moment and considering starting from scratch. Any ideas?

If you want to try to fix things without doing a repair install or a
complete reinstall, then check
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
to see what accounts currently exist. You will find SYSTEM, LocalService
and NetworkService under the "short" SID keys and Administrator and your
unique accounts under the longer SID keys. This tells you how many
accounts that Windows recognizes and the ProfileImagePath shows you the
account profile folder, but doesn't necessarily help you fix the problem
with User Accounts.

You can compare the list of active accounts to the set of user profiles
under Documents and Settings to see which profiles there might have been
orphaned.

Run "control userpasswords2" and see if she set any of her accounts to
be other than "Administrator" or "User". If this is XP Home Edition, you
often have trouble if you set accounts to Power User or anything other
than Administrator or User (aka limited). Set the account types back to
Administrator or User and then see if you can access them properly.

 

[Mike]

You can compare the list of active accounts to the set of user profiles
under Documents and Settings to see which profiles there might have been
orphaned.

Run "control userpasswords2" and see if she set any of her accounts to
be other than "Administrator" or "User". If this is XP Home Edition, you
often have trouble if you set accounts to Power User or anything other
than Administrator or User (aka limited). Set the account types back to
Administrator or User and then see if you can access them properly.

Wow nice one Kent where did you find that gem?
All users were set for Administrator.
I guess she would be better off with a clean install anyways.
Time for a backup and maybe some convincing to go with an XP Pro upgrade.

 

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

Wow nice one Kent where did you find that gem?

It's been too long ago for me to remember who first found the old win2K
user accounts control panel in XP. It was likely during the beta. Only
later did someone figure out that setting user account types to other
than Administrator and User caused mysterious problems. Since TweakUI
has the ability to set auto-logon, the win2K user accounts control panel
is deprecated by most of us.

 

[randy]

That command has been around for a very long time

It's been too long ago for me to remember who first found the old win2K
user accounts control panel in XP. It was likely during the beta. Only
later did someone figure out that setting user account types to other
than Administrator and User caused mysterious problems. Since TweakUI
has the ability to set auto-logon, the win2K user accounts control panel
is deprecated by most of us.