Hi, I run WinXP Home with Norton IS 03, with firewall and antivirus. A week ago I noticed AV was mysteriously shutting down its auto protect ability all by itself. A few days ago, the Norton icons disappeared from the icons in the bottom right. I tried to run NIS, but it said I was not logged on. So I logged on a supervisor, and tried to activate security, but nothing happened. This is extremely frustrating since it is hard to find advice on what to do when the buttons do nothing. I also cannot enable auto-protect. You may think this is more of a NIS issue, but something else strange has happened. I cant run msconfig.exe, I get the message "Operation cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. PLease contact admin." But I AM the admin. I am the only user, and I have the only account. I've checked and it has admin privileges. NIS says there are 3 user accounts in operation, mine, a guest ("not logged in") account with restricted abilites, and one that says ASPNET. I've no idea what this is. I've checked task manager and services for suspicious looking processes/ services. Restarted, NIS and auto-protect, rebooted PC plenty of times, done windows update. Ran virus scan and killed 18 w32.kwbots, ran ad-adware and spybot. I'm at a loss. I even installed ZoneAlarm free firewall, but it has disabled itself. I get the same message about restrictions on the computer. So it's now been uninstalled! I can't get to msconfig in anyway, which is bizarre. I can't believe someone can block me on my own PC. I am on a university network, but I don't think they would do something like this (why would they want to?). After some advice from elsewhere, I have rebooted in safe mode and rerun Norton AV scan, nothing found. And also ran Stinger. Also, the \windows folder is not visible on my C:\ drive, I can get to it through the address bar. I have not changed the folder options. thanks

Uninstall Norton and put in wheelie-bin then install AVG from Grisoft.com

jon, forget the last post, have a read of these, I had the same problem - now cured. Good luck John http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/82259.html http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/82218.html http://www.computing.net/security/wwwboard/forum/7028.html

Hi, I've checked out those links but they seem relevant to someone who can't open regedit. I can't find anything to do with problems with msconfig. More problems have appeared. I installed ZoneAlarm and it worked fine, until I restarted. I got my favourite line of the moment about restrictions on the computer. So was forced to uninstall it (it was somehow blocking access to my IMAP email). Also, Norton has got worse, I cannot even log on. The log on button is greyed out. I am totally stuck again.

Hi.. read your message as i am having exactly the same problem... looked at the 3 links posted here... and this seemed to work.. i've probably broke somthing but it makes sense to me.. so goto this registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\DisallowRun then in there you should find the progs you can't run... a bit of surfing aroudn the registry and viola there they were.. deleted the keys 'msconfig.exe' and 'zonealarm.exe' to start if i come acros anyothers i know where to go.. any way give it a try... worked for me.. i did backup the old registry before fiddling but so far so good!!!! hope it helps