Access denied error on administrator's account

[George Steinert]

I'm the sole operator and administrator on my XP Home
Edition system. When trying to install an update to a new
program (Visual Communicator by Serious Magic), I'm
getting this error msg: "You do not have access to make
the required system configuration modifications. Please
rerun this installation from an administrators account."
But I am the administrator. Dell tells me the problem is
a bug in the vendor software. Vendor says they never
heard of this problem but sent me a new disk. I tried
installing again (disabling Norton AV, etc.) and still get
the same error. Any ideas?

 

[T-Rex]

-----Original Message-----
I'm the sole operator and administrator on my XP Home
Edition system. When trying to install an update to a new
program (Visual Communicator by Serious Magic), I'm
getting this error msg: "You do not have access to make
the required system configuration modifications. Please
rerun this installation from an administrators account."
But I am the administrator. Dell tells me the problem is
a bug in the vendor software. Vendor says they never
heard of this problem but sent me a new disk. I tried
installing again (disabling Norton AV, etc.) and still get
the same error. Any ideas?
.

Try booting up in safe mode by pressing F8 at boot up.
There will be an administrator account available from
there, which if you don't have passworded, I suggest
passwording it while you're at it. By default it is
unpassworded, so simply click on the account to log in.
This may or may not work for you... but I'm kind of
wondering... is your regular user account a "computer
administrator" account? If it is, I don't understand why
you wouldn't have the permissions to install the update.
Check in control panel under "User Accounts" and double
check.