Because of problems with an installation of Windows XP, my friend has installed a second copy of XP professional on his PC. The original installation is now only accessible using safe mode.
The problem is that at some stage his main user account’s password on the original installation was changed using the local administrator account. As a result the account seems to have lost access to it’s private encryption key which he used to encrypt a set of very important files. Now the files cannot be read without the original encryption key.
There is a MS KB article Q290260 outlining the problem. It does suggest setting the password back to the original password which we’ve already tried but with no success.
Does anybody out there know of any way of recovering the original private encryption key? It’s must be still on the system somewhere!