Problem with setting Admin rights on Windows XP Home PC

[Jim Seay]

I was forced, recently, to reformat the boot drive on my PC (running
Windows XP Home, Service Pack 2). fortunately, I had ghosted the
contents of my boot drive, to a new hard drive, so I made the new drive
my boot drive. I then used my Windows XP install CD to run a Repair
Installation. It works, for the most part, except for the fact I can no
longer install drivers.
I tried running sfc, from the command line, and was told I did not have
administrator rights. I checked the user profiles option, under Control
Panel, and this showed my user profile DID have administrator rights. I
rebooted in safe mode, and created a new profile, with administrator
rights. Unfortunately, when I rebooted normally, and tried installing
drivers under my new profile, I got the same error messages. ATI's
Catalyst Control Panel also confirms my lack of administrator rights.
Does anyone have any ideas on how I can rectify this situation, short of
reinstalling the OS?

 

[Steven L Umbach]

If you can get a copy of secedit from an installation of XP Pro you can try
to use it as described in the KB article below to reset security settings
back to default defined levels but ultimately your best solution probably
will be to do a clean install. Often those access control lists and user
rights become modified by malware to try and prevent administrators from
cleaning the computer. Make sure you visit Microsoft Website "Protect Your
PC" tips to make sure you are doing the basics to protect your computer and
network. --- Steve

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;313222
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/protect/windowsxpsp2/Default.mspx
--- Protect Your PC