Made and error and need help

[TAK]

Background info: Laptop running Vista Home Premium, pre-installed with no
backup disc. One account, had admin privileges but UAC is still on.

Here's the problem I have run into, and hopefully you all may be able to
help me.
I accidentally set my \Users\ permissions to deny all access to my C drive,
or at least that's what I think has happened. I have been searching for a
possible work around but to no avail. Any ideas on how to fix this issue
without reinstalling?

 

[Beoweolf]

Boot into Safe mode, logon with built-in administrator account . Then try to
open disc properties, check what the current setting are listed.

 

[TAK]

Well, here's what I managed to do over the course of the past few hours. I
did some researching on this board, and got net user administrator
/active:yes command to work with a little finangleing while in safe mode.
Then on that user, used regedit to change the hex value to turn off UAC
(found on another thread), added the Users group object into all of the HKey
directories and changed the permissions there for full access on each. Then
rebooted, logged back in as admin, and changed the ownership of the c drive
to the admistrators group which caught some errors, rebooted, and have been
systematically changing the ownership of individual erroring folders back to
administrators group with the sub-folder option checked.

This doesn't seem like the quick and easy way, and I think I am going to
have to change the ownership back over to the Users group by the time i am
done incase I want to use the guest account in the future, but so far it is
working.