administrator is not administrator?

[bbxrider]

for xp home
Im trying to help a friend 'reinstall' an application, its the comcast ie
toolbar
she had it installed previous but somehow lost it,
while logged into an administrator account trying to install (or reinstall
so to speak since it was installed previous)
and getting some message 'insufficient privilege need to be an
administrator'
of course comcast tech supp has told her its her system, to reinstall xp,
its easy to council t hat if its not your machine
for sure her account is admin.
any possible situation how this can happen?
i always thought if your admin thats it, no other questions needed
any ideas appreciated
bbxrider

 

[Mike C.]

What may have happened was that a registry setting has been modified to the
point that it gives that error message. This message can occur if a policy
setting was set somewhere.

Unfortunately, their recommendation to reinstall is probably the only
solution.

At any rate, make sure to install IE7 and Defender next time.

 

[Charlie Tame]

It is possible for an account to be named "Administrator" but not be an
administrator. For example one could do this so that if someone tried to get
into the machine the default admin name would actually log them in as an
unprivileged user

So has the machine always been hers?

If she cannot get in as an admin there's not a lot you can do, reinstall is
probably the simplest way.

Also this could be a sign of damage from some sort of malicious software.
Sorry to sound a bit negative.

Charlie

 

[bbxrider]

thanks for the reply
i did some checking and found this policy setting list
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=41dc179b-3328-4350-
ade1-c0d9289f09ef&displaylang=en
so your saying it could one (or more) those approx 2500 settings that is set
to disable/off/etc that the comcast installer is checking
so that it assumes the user is not an administrator because of insufficient
privileges????
there are so many detailed settings there, is there some policy setting
application that has them all in one place where they
can be administered, without having to pick them out one by one in the
registry?
bbx

 

[bbxrider]

thanks for the reply, one of few things i'm sure of, is that she is logged
into an administrator account
there is only one adm acct on the machine
i had set that up a while ago when the pc was new

 

[Charlie Tame]

Well maybe either the admin account has been broken or else some folder the
installer is trying to access has had the admin removed from it's
permissions list. Of course it's also possible the program is flawed and the
error message is completely irrelevant to the actual problem. Sometimes
security software can lock things too, I'd be wary of messing with too many
important settings if there's a chance it's just this one program.

Charlie