Last week, I was battling a huge wave of spyware, malware, adware, and worms on my PC on a very massive scale. It took nearly 10 programs altogether to get rid of [most of] that crap. And now my PC runs fine again, but now I don't have admin rights in WinXP x64 anymore! I don't know what happened but now I can't access my network settings, I can't access the control panel, I can't even view the desktop properties! Is there a way that I can get back to the admin level? I really need to get to the control panel without having to read some crap error message telling my I have restrictions. This sucks. Any ideas? Thanks.

I would assume that the crap that was on your computer played around with your administrative rights to stop you from easily getting rid of it, what I suggest is that you just reinstall windows.

do NOT remove your Vista for now. does spybot SD even install or update? best way to remove and prevent stuffs like that. teatimer could get on your nerves, but disabling it wouldnt be really any less safe, since the major stuff is blocked efficiently

Actually he's running Windows XP 64bit edition and not Vista, he lost administrative privileges and he wants them back, I find that the best way to do so is a fresh reformat, this also has the added benefit of getting rid of anything that the Anti-malware might have missed.

I concur with Player-X. Backup everything (which you should be doing anyway), format and reinstall. It's not worth the hassle.

You could always download one of those hack programs that allows you to reset your administrator password. They are usually made for NT 4 but I believe they will work on XP as well.

What you get is a program that boots off a floppy or some other boot device, it runs some command-line thing and asks what you'd like the password to be. Set it to blank otherwise you can't get in.

After that, reboot normally, log in as adminstrator, and run gpedit.msc - in there is a whole lot of settings you can play with.

If you reckon you are part of the Administrators group already, you can run gpedit.msc now.

If you find that there are no restrictions set, log in as the Adminstrator, go to your profile and delete any NTUSER.* files - the side effect being you lose most of your settings, and you may need to reinstall some programs.

In other words, er, good luck!

i noticed, just wrote vista as i was speeding out to lab.
in all cases, if all is backep up properly, possibly even including the program settings, then a reinstall turns viable. using a livecd of acronis trueimage (ideally the Universal one) would allow seamless backup of your stuff, including incremental updates. Worth buying just for the safe backuping factor

I've only had my computer die from malware twice in the past, and it wasn't this machine. My PC normally dies due to me changing something a system level. I keep all my documents on another partition incase my OS commits suicide. I generally re-install Windows every few months anyway, because it tends to become gunged up.

Last time my OS committed suicide was three days ago when I tried to install a SP1 beta. Vista didn't boot again.
So I shoved in the install disc and after 10 minutes, I was back in. Only took me about an hour to install all my programs, tweak settings and copy profiles across from the old installation.

I keep a folder with all the setups for my programs/drivers and update it occasionally. It's just a case of launching them all and restarting a few times. I also keep backups of stuff like my firefox profiles, so I can just copy it in, and all my plugins, favourites, passwords, themes and settings are there. So it doesn't take me long to get stuff back the way it was.

Personally I prefer to reformat when my computer starts to get noticeably sluggish so I don't tend to keep important stuff on my computer's main drive.