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Problem with Local User Group.

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by is

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I have many machines that seem to randomly change a user's local group setting from Administrator to Debugger User. This causes many problems for the user. My first question is does anyone know what causes this random change to happen. The second is does anyone know how to prevent it? Thanks, Jason.

27 replies

by sgt_shultz

wha-?

debugger user? are you serious? i am gonna have to look for that one, never heard of it.

got virus?

by gigelul

What kind of problems have your users?
We speak about a domain user or a local user added to local admin group?

I just checked two XP workstations (only to be sure) and the local administrator is member of debugger users group also/by default.

by gigelul

After you fix the issue on one PC it happend again?
Do you use some scripts to manage the users in groups?

I don't see this issue before.
Are you sure that this happend randomly or somebody don't know what he/she doing?

by is

These users were local administrators on their box and domain users. They were not Debugger users before. I just looked and I am not listed as both. I am listed just as a Local Administrator.

What I have noticed about when people suddenly change to Debugger User is a wide range of things. Sometimes it is weird errors when running software on the machine. When installing software, it crashes.

by is

There is still no solution to this problem. The only somewhat helpful area is in the Advanced tab of IE's configuration. There is a check box for 'disable script debugging(other)' that may have something to do with this problem.

I guess no one has ever had this problem...

by ericadawn72

I have seen this problem as well. I was also looking for a solution to this. It is random and is not caused by any sort of virus. I just wanted to let you know that you are not the only one with this problem.

by cbianchini

After much troubleshooting we discovered this occurs when an application crashes and you get the Microsoft window asking you to debug/send info to microsoft. It also can occur when doing a detect and repair in Office. I am working with Microsoft now to determine what caused this change to occur since it only started recently.

by philipl

I'm having the same problem. Randomly multiple PCs started locking up when clicking start. We found that the user had been removed from the local admin group and was only a member of the local debugger group. If we add the user back to the local admin group everything seems to be fine. I've read a few posts that say this behavior repeats itself. Please let me know if you have found a solution.

Thank You,
Phil

by christian.mccarty

We have about 150 employees all running XP Pro - we're in a Windows 2003 Server/DC/AD environment.

I just joined the company about a month ago (my background is *NIX) and one of the problems they have is this same problem - local user accounts randomly switching from "administrator" to "debugger user."

This was really perplexing until I realized that "debugger user" isn't even one of the default groups in a fresh install of Windows XP - even after joining the domain.

I've discoverd that Microsoft Office (in our case, Office 2003) adds this user group when it is first installed.

Of course, this is good to know and we can simply delete that group after we install Office - but, now we have over 100 PCs that we'll have to visit, one-on-one in order to delete this user group...

Anyone out there know if this can be scripted?

Hope this helps!

by christian.mccarty

Running "detect and repair" from within Office re-adds the "debugger user" group to the local users and switches the user to debugger user.

Ugh.

We have opened a trouble ticket with MS, as well.

In the meantime, this script may come in handy...

Delete a Local Group

Description

Deletes a local group named FinanceUsers from a computer named atl-ws-01.

Supported Platforms

Windows Server 2003
Yes

Windows XP
Yes

Windows 2000
Yes

Windows NT 4.0
Yes

Windows 98
Yes

Script Code

strComputer = "atl-ws-01"

Set objComputer = GetObject("WinNT://" & strComputer & "")

objComputer.Delete "group", "FinanceUsers"

by christian.mccarty

Since running "detect and repair" is one of the things that re-adds the debugger users group, we've added a logon script in GP thusly:

On Error Resume Next

strComputer = "."

Set objComputer = GetObject("WinNT://" & strComputer & "")

objComputer.Delete "group", "Debugger Users"

Miscrosoft has said that they can reproduce the problem, but cannot reproduce the performance degradation. And their suggestion was that we use a logon script to delete the group... yeesh...

What we've seen is that sometimes the debugger user is added to the user's account (member of both administrators and debugger users groups - no performance degradation) and sometimes the user is actually switched from administrator to debugger users (definite performace degradation).

Hope this helps...

by dpedrick

I have noticed that when a user has only user right on the domain, but is set up as an administrator on the local machine that this sometimes happens. Just a thought.

D

by cbianchini

Microsoft told us the same and we had to run the script like you did. What a pain. They told us as well that they saw no performance issues. Seems like they do not intend to do anything further with this other then tell us to write a script. They stated this is 'working as designed'

by dbuchanan

Well over half the PC's in our office have shown this behaviour over the last few months. It appears to be related to Visual Studio 2005 and .NET; installing this automatically creates the Debugger Users group for debugging purposes.
It seems that this has happened automatically when something was installed.
Elements of VS are installed on all Windows setups even though we don't use it consciously - it's a law firm.
The questions remains: Why does the Group change from Administrator to Debugger Users - automatically?
The main result of this on our machines is that the scheduled AutoUpdate of VirusScan will not work because Debugger Users provides less permissions than Administrators.
Also, it seems to recur after some time; I've fixed it several times on some machines.
We need help from Microsoft on this.

by dbuchanan

On Saturday I went to all 40 machines to do updates and look at logs. I confirm that every machine has been effected by this problem, some several times. Every machine where VirusScan updates did not work had Debugger Users set as the Group. I set all of them back to Administrators and will see over the next few weeks if they stay that way.

by fernando

I am experiencing the same issue on multiple computers at 2 different Networks. The VB script listed will kill the Debugger users group. If a User has switched to debugger from Administrator, is there a way to create a script that will change the user from debugger to administrator. Or has there been any new solutions to this problem.

by locolobo

I have the error and was unaware. We use XP and Office 2003 so I thought I would have a look. Apparently it doesn't move the local administrator account, or domain groups. Most of our users are not members of the local administrator group. Maybe that's why we haven't had any problems yet.

It figures M$ doesn't want to solve the problem. Rather than write a fix they will probably say 'best practice' is don't put people in the local admin group.

by dhess

We have about 25 clients all running Small Business Server 2003 with XP clients. We ALSO have the same problem on the XP clients, where, for no reason at all, the Administrator user is switched to Debugger User. For the most part, the overall network settings are the same, network to network. This problem randomly occurs with some clients, and not at all with other clients. Has anyone, A) found a reason why the user changes and B) has anyone found a solution yet????

ARGH!!!!!

by wilder

We are having this issue too. Our support desk indicated it has been happening for several months, but it appears from these threads that is has been an issue for awhile. Anyone know what Microsoft is saying? It happens for many reasons, even simple things such as an Excel patch. It is extremely frustrating because we are also in the process of rolling out LUA (Least User Access) and this issue is causing us much grief as it is overwriting permissions we have granted and my project is getting the brunt of negative feedback. Very frustrating!!! Is there a way to disable this?

by katyapenelope

Well in my company we have the same problem... almost all users that are as Administrators have the same problem... How can we solve the problem from the Active Directory??? I already delete this user group on my computer but the problem still there! where do I have to delete this group???

by alphatech9

That is not a default group for XP or Server so something is odd.....

Can't you just move all the users from that group and into another group? Then just delete the debugger group?

Or has this affected the entire OU? If so what is the OU that is affected and can you move the users into another OU all together?

by dbuchanan

Last time I surveyed the 40+ PC's here I did not find the problem happening any more. I have NOT deleted the Debugger Users group but have repeatedly removed the user from that group. I also installed the Visual C+ Redistributable patch which removed the Side-by-Side messages in the log and may have impacted this problem. I still maintain Admin permissions for all users, in spite of Microsoft's insistence we don't do that. Maybe Vista will make this easier - whenever that becomes sensible. For now, I'm just watching to see if the problem comes back.

by fire2007

I have had a couple usershaving problems and after hours of trying resolve the problem I discovered they were in Debugger mode. My take on what happened was,when I removed them from the Admin group and didn't put them in another group they ended up in Debugger Group after I change them to a User Group everything was fine.

by dhess

I've been watching this issue for a good 6 months now and Microsoft deosn't have a solution & it appears that they could care less about providing a solution.

Even if you delete the 'Debugger User' group, 'Detect and Repair' and even bigger, 'Microsoft Updates' put the group back for us all.

It is definitely caused by a user pushing the 'Debug' Program button when a program fails.

I've seen 'Debugger User' disable quite a few options, including being unable to print.

My suggestion is to 1) take all users out of the 'administrators' and 'power users' group, so they are not given the option to 'debug' a program.

I'm not sure if there is a way to totally disable the 'debug program' feature in Windows. That would also be something to look into.

by ldl

Solution that we use.

if the domain user is a member of the local administrators group, you can add the following into your users domain login script.

net localgroup "Debugger Users" /delete

this deletes the "Debugger Users" group from the local system every time the user logs in. If the group does not exist, an error is logged and the login script continues.

then, the domain user account can not be changed from the local administrators group to the "Debugger Users" group that does not exist.

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