I don't have full administrator rights windows 7, UAC Disabled

[KT888]

I have a nightmare situation. I allowed a Norton Level 2 Case Manager to connect to my system as the new version of Norton 360 (v22) causes major problems on your system. Word Doesn't work. Excel doesn't work. FF doesn't work. Chrome doesn't work. MSIE doesn't work. All because of a new "Feature" they call "Exploit Prevention" Anyway while he was connected one of the things he did was change my Administrator account. I'm really not sure what he did because he did it really fast and it made no sense. Even though the account was an administrator account he changed it to an administrator account. I didn't see how he did it exactly. But seriously that's exactly what he did. NOW however I NO LONGER seem to actually have administrator rights. I can't run many applications that I have been running ON THIS SYSTEM for about a year and a half. I can't for example download something to the root of my C drive which is where I typically download something until I use it and put it where it belongs. btw some apps will run if I right click and run as administrator but some just won't run at all anymore. One message I get is "A referral was returned from the server" I have no idea what that means it's not even a network type app. Other apps just don't start and the dialog box says "... has stopped working with check online for a solution or close the program.

Also when I used to bring up a dos windows ie:cmd it would automatically be an elevated command prompt and now I have to right click on the cmd icon in the start menu and select run as administrator so I can no longer use CTRL+R to start the command prompt. FF session manager can no longer even backup session data because I don't have rights to write files to the Program Files (x86) directory so any application that needs to write to that directory fails and probably the Program Files directory as well and I would speculate even the ProgramData directory. sigh.

Please help me I need to get my administrator rights back. If I have to reinstall Windows to get a proper administrative account again it will take me at least a couple hundred hours to install everything and customize it to the degree it is now. I can't believe this guy was a LEVEL 2 CASE MANAGER. That he would come into my house and render my computer completely unusable. I mean I literally cannot run MANY pieces of software that are absolute essentials for me.

I should mention that I already had UAC disabled and it still is so please don't suggest that solution as most of the google research I did suggested that as the solution.

 

[USAFRet]

"If I have to reinstall Windows to get a proper administrative account again it will take me at least a couple hundred hours to install everything and customize it to the degree it is now."

That is what I would do. No question.
Go nuclear, with a full wipe and reinstall.

It's not just a matter of regaining proper admin rights, its a case of what else did he do in there.
There is no way I would trust this system as it is.

 

[ikaz]

I agree just re-image, while it will take you a long time to customize it again it the best option and this time don't install Nortan software.

 

[USAFRet]

This is specifically what backups and imaging is for.

Given a proper backup schedule, you just go back to the day before this happened.
Then uninstall that Norton junk, and move on.

 

[KT888]

"If I have to reinstall Windows to get a proper administrative account again it will take me at least a couple hundred hours to install everything and customize it to the degree it is now."

That is what I would do. No question.
Go nuclear, with a full wipe and reinstall.

It's not just a matter of regaining proper admin rights, its a case of what else did he do in there.
There is no way I would trust this system as it is.

I guess you don't have a life. Do you know there are 168 hours in a week. So what you're suggesting is I take 3 weeks to get my system back to where it is right now. WHILE NOT Doing anything else I would be doing during that 200+ hours. I would prefer SERIOUS responses from now on not foolish responses like this individual. And btw I actually use this machine for business. What do you suggest I do in the meantime. Unbelievable. I expect more from Tom's People.

 

[boosted1g]

"If I have to reinstall Windows to get a proper administrative account again it will take me at least a couple hundred hours to install everything and customize it to the degree it is now."

That is what I would do. No question.
Go nuclear, with a full wipe and reinstall.

It's not just a matter of regaining proper admin rights, its a case of what else did he do in there.
There is no way I would trust this system as it is.

I guess you don't have a life. Do you know there are 168 hours in a week. So what you're suggesting is I take 3 weeks to get my system back to where it is right now. WHILE NOT Doing anything else I would be doing during that 200+ hours. I would prefer SERIOUS responses from now on not foolish responses like this individual. And btw I actually use this machine for business. What do you suggest I do in the meantime. Unbelievable. I expect more from Tom's People.

So what would happen if the hard drive just died on you, or if windows corrupted????

USAFRet is right on with backups.

For the cost of 1 hard drive, you can schedule full disk image backups to run on whatever schedule you choose, then when you have a problem like this you just revert back in 30 minutes or less.

If you have THAT many installed programs and customization then surely you understand that data can be lost, and can install a hard-drive and setup a backup software; your own ignorance to protect against failure, sorry to say, is your fault. Even worse when this is a business PC.

 

[USAFRet]

"If I have to reinstall Windows to get a proper administrative account again it will take me at least a couple hundred hours to install everything and customize it to the degree it is now."

That is what I would do. No question.
Go nuclear, with a full wipe and reinstall.

It's not just a matter of regaining proper admin rights, its a case of what else did he do in there.
There is no way I would trust this system as it is.

I guess you don't have a life. Do you know there are 168 hours in a week. So what you're suggesting is I take 3 weeks to get my system back to where it is right now. WHILE NOT Doing anything else I would be doing during that 200+ hours. I would prefer SERIOUS responses from now on not foolish responses like this individual. And btw I actually use this machine for business. What do you suggest I do in the meantime. Unbelievable. I expect more from Tom's People.

I DO have a life.
In my system, this would take about 20 minutes to reimage, and reconstitute the system to exactly as it was at 2AM the day before this happened.

While there may be some long convoluted sequences of 'fixes'...you have zero idea what else he did in there.
Given that he screwed with the admin permissions (your admin permissions), how can you continue to trust the system?

What do you suggest I do in the meantime.

Devise a simple, effective, tested, backup plan. So that when weird stuff like this happens, it is not a week long effort to fix it.
This is little different than a massive virus infection, or a simple drive fail.

 

[COLGeek]

"If I have to reinstall Windows to get a proper administrative account again it will take me at least a couple hundred hours to install everything and customize it to the degree it is now."

That is what I would do. No question.
Go nuclear, with a full wipe and reinstall.

It's not just a matter of regaining proper admin rights, its a case of what else did he do in there.
There is no way I would trust this system as it is.

I guess you don't have a life. Do you know there are 168 hours in a week. So what you're suggesting is I take 3 weeks to get my system back to where it is right now. WHILE NOT Doing anything else I would be doing during that 200+ hours. I would prefer SERIOUS responses from now on not foolish responses like this individual. And btw I actually use this machine for business. What do you suggest I do in the meantime. Unbelievable. I expect more from Tom's People.

That was a serious reply and is the best advice for long term stability and security.

Of course, you could remove Norton. Also, is there more than one admin account on this system?

200+ hours is either an extreme estimate or you have a VERY complex system (one that should certainly be making regular backups if indeed as complex as you assert).

 

[boosted1g]

What you have to understand too is that while we know of tools that will allow to modify the privileges of your account, it is completely against the forum rules to help you hack your computer because we in no way know if it is your computer, or if maybe you are not supposed to have admin access and are trying to bypass it. Not saying that you are, but just saying that we have no real way to know that. While you might be cursing us now for not helping you, you would sure be happy when we are not telling the guy who stole your laptop at the coffee shop how to hack your password.

Not to mention that once we tell you how to hack your computer, that information is there for everyone to see.

On a side note, for the future, it is best to have a backup admin account setup on business computers.

 

[ikaz]

What you should do you really can't be down for that long and this is a business is to buy/build another PC while looking into backup solutions. If I ran a business I sure would make sure a simple PC failure (which can occur at anytime) wouldn't bring my business down.

 

[COLGeek]

If you have a working alternate admin account, you could treat this problem like a corrupted user profile and "create" a new profile.

 

[KT888]

Thanks guys that's all good advice. I actually do have a backup strategy in place. I'm back up already actually. I just used Windows restore. The reason I didn't do that right away is on my other machine Windows restore doesn't work anymore and I was thinking this was the machine that windows restore doesn't work anymore. But it did and now I'm fixed. My backups tend to be of the data sort and I haven't really found one that makes good OS backups. I tried EaseUS Todo Backup but I have no idea if it worked properly because I found a bunch of people online who were saying the restores do not work so I stopped using Todo backup. I still do backups of all the data on my windows drive related to the apps but I would still have to reinstall all the apps and then I could copy the backed up folders to the installed folders and that should get the apps mostly back to where they were. I'll have to try it to see I haven't had to yet so I really don't know. My systems ARE very complex but 200 hrs might be an over estimate in any case now that I think about the Backups I do have that should cut down the time dramatically but would still take a lot of time implementing all the customizations I do to my systems. I customize every application I install to my systems (There's 163 of them). I know most people don't bother doing that or even know fully what most of the apps on their system are even capable of. And all of that takes time. And that assumes I remember the way I had it set up before which obviously I don't seeing as there are so many of them with MANY settings and preferences in each one of them. That's what takes all the time. Anyway thanks for the help and the good advice it's now out there to benefit all in the future. Good job.

I did try the alternate admin account based on info I found online but the methods suggested didn't work. I also tried enabling the hidden admin account but that didn't produce the result I needed either and I really didn't want to create an alternate profile since that's basically the same as reinstalling windows since I would have to reinstall everything except windows anyway.

 

[Rogue Leader]

So the moral of the story... don't trust Norton!

 

[COLGeek]

I say NO to Norton/Symantec and McAfee products. They are simply too intrusive.

 

[USAFRet]

I say NO to Norton/Symantec and McAfee products. They are simply too intrusive.

My mantra for a couple of decades.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Do you know 100% that he was from Symantec/Norton? There's a lot of scammers that post phone numbers, call you, have websites etc. claiming to be from reputable companies like these, then remote in and break stuff, and demand you pay ~$200 to fix it.

 

[Lutfij]

^Agreed! I've been living without Norton+McAfee after I got burned back in the Windows XP era.

One more thing, KT888, optimizing and tweaking your system inclusive of updating your OS to SP1 and all the patches provided by Microsoft should in essence take you less than 50 hours from start to finish. It takes me longer due to having a slower ISP and multitasking other chores in my schedule. On another note, if you have too many settings to tinker with, best take screenshots with snipping tools and save them on an external storage device for safe keeping. The last thing to note is all this back and forth may have left your system chugging along with a serious limp but your productivity could've been maximized when you just did a reinstall of your OS as too much time was wasted trying to figure out what went wrong.

I've also found that restore points don't often work to your hearts content and for 2 systems I'd worked on they take longer than to reinstall your OS. Keeping a backup of your software/drivers and settings are all welcome measures from a productivity machine.

My 2 cents though.

edit: Moral of the story, USAFRet was right to begin with

 

[KT888]

For the cost of 1 hard drive, you can schedule full disk image backups to run on whatever schedule you choose, then when you have a problem like this you just revert back in 30 minutes or less.

@boosted1g - I've got 38 internal and external drives. I've got an internal and an external that's a mirror backup of the internal drive. The only thing that's not perfect is my OS backup solution.
Could you recommend a good disk imaging application for windows?

 

[USAFRet]

For the cost of 1 hard drive, you can schedule full disk image backups to run on whatever schedule you choose, then when you have a problem like this you just revert back in 30 minutes or less.

@boosted1g - Could you recommend a good disk imaging application for windows?

I use Macrium Reflect.
Read here for my actual procedure: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

 

[KT888]

Thanks USAFRet I'll give it a try.