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UNABLE TO LOG ON AS ADMINISTRATOR

By R.E.KNIGHT ·
Hello,

I started having the strangest problem lately. The last couple of programs I installed ( games actually ? Medal of Honor Breakthrough and Call of Duty) will not even load or attempt to start. Instead I get an error message of ?Access Denied ? Please login with administrator privileges and try again?.

This is a single user computer and I believe I am the computer administrator. However I have also tried to log on as ?Administrator? (with the appropriate password) and get another error message that says ?Logon Message - Unable to log you on because of an account restriction?.

I have tried changing administrator passwords from the DOS window, using the command
? net user administrator newpassword?. This command completes successfully but does not help my problem.

The computer is a 1 year old Dell Dimension 8200, P4 cpu @ 2.53 MHZ, 1 Gig RAM, 120 GB HD, etc, operating system is Windows XP Home edition. It is networked (hardwired with cable) with an older Dell XPS B800r through a Linksys 4 port wireless router.

The only other problem I have had recently is that the last 3 ?critical updates? for windows will not install. They downloaded to my computer OK, but I get an error message that the ?..install failed?try again?. I have tried again with same results. I don?t know if this problem is related to the game not running problem, but I am getting suspicious.

I have searched the knowledge data base and the Dell database and the game makers database but cannot find any help for this problem. I think something in the operating system (registry??) may be corrupted. I hope you can help with this problem.

Thanks,

Ralph Knight

r.e.knight@juno.coom

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by jayeliz In reply to UNABLE TO LOG ON AS ADMIN ...

Some programs do indeed need to be installed under administrator privileges and a way around that is to reboot the computer in safe mode and login under administrator which shouldn't need a password. Install the games or apps and reboot into normal mode. This sometimes works. As far as your updates go, you might have a corrupt system config and will need to reinstall. If reinstall is not an option, remember to create a restore point whenever you make changes so that in case of trouble you can revert back to original config.

Hope this helps

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by w2ktechman In reply to UNABLE TO LOG ON AS ADMIN ...

It sounds like a problem witht he SAM file. You can log in and rename %systemroot%\system32\config\SAM to SAM.old and then reboot. Upon reboot the SAM file is recreated with an ADMINISTRATOR account with no password. Then I would re-add the user to the Administrators group to be sure. You can do this from Control Panel -- users

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