Documents and Settings

This is just a wild guess, but had you changed your username or password since that restore point was created?

Tom

I bought this PC at a garage sale. The person selling it said it had not been used for a while and it needed service. When I took it home the computer would not even start up. No power. I replaced the power supply and the PC booted up right away. That's when I did the restore because I wanted to start somewhat fresh at one point. I don't know if the previous owner had a password or not.

What kind of "restore" did you perform? Did you use a restore disk that came with the computer, or restore from the hidden restore partition?

It sounds like the restore process did not wipe out the previous owners "Documents and Setting" folder, and you would need to use the same login information to gain access to that folder. I would create a new User Account as administrator, then go back and delete that old user account once you are logging in on the new account. The way to do this can be different, depending on the OS installed. Is this a windows machine?

Tom

Yes, I did a restore from the hidden particion. This is an HP Pavillion (not too old)running on Windows XP. I think I did try to removed the previous "Owner" but I am not sure now.

Thank you for your response, I think you are going to get me somewhere!

If you go to "Settings" "User Accounts", how many accounts show up there? I'm sitting at an XP Pro machine now, and my main machine at home is XP Media Center, so I may have a hard time with XP Home, it does the user stuff a bit differently than Pro and MCE, but take a look at the user accounts to see what that shows.

Tom

Ok, I will check the "settings" and "user accounts" when I get home tonight. I'm log on at work right now. You have been very helpful and concerned. Thanks a lot.

Ok, I got back to the computer last night and started fiddling with until I got the "Start" button to show up. At one time I had no Desktop at all, just a blank screen.

By hitting the Ctl-Alt-Del keys for a while, I finally got the "Start" button to show up.

Then I did what you suggested to do. Went to "Settings" "User Accounts" and there were two user accounts "Owner" and "Guest" . I added another User with my name, changed the user previlleges, and set my name as "Administrator"

I have my Desktop back with all the program icons on it and the machine is back to normal.

Thank you for your suggestions. You have been of great help.

Glad I could help, and thanks for coming back to post your results. Too many times, people don't come back to give their feedback, or results.

When people do come back to update the thread, it helps anyone in the future that searches the archives for answers to a similar problem.

Tom

To anyone who creates an account with Administrator privileges, like hernaju1 did (above), remember that living/browsing-the-web as an administrator is dangerous

It is always best to create an account in your name that is a restricted user, and use that until the moment you have to install/update software. Then you can login as an administrator, do the deed, and switch back to the restricted level.

This is the only safe way to use Windows-XP. Living as an administrator is the single greatest reason XP computers have to be wiped and reinstalled from scratch.

Thanks for the good advise. I appreciate it, any good leads are welcome.

Thanks again;

hernaju1

Avid,

I can argue with you on that, unfortunately, there are so many software packages out there that simply refuse to run on limited accounts (bad programming in my opinion). I tried to set my daughters computer to run on a limited account, and finally had to give up after so many of things she needed to run wouldn't work. I think they have improved that with Vista(?) and for sure with Windows 7.

Tom

I have another PC running on Vista and so far the only thing I have trouble with is making some of my peripherals run properly like my HP Photosmart printer. Even after downloading the drivers it still does not work properly.

I never had problems with XP, in fact, I like it better than Vista on some applications. I don't know about Windows 7.

I had the same problem with the "limited access account" also. I don't know what it is. The only time that it would work is if you set if to "full control" but that is what you don't want.

I have seen those programs too, like accounting software.
One can still maintain two login sessions, and hide IE browser icons on the administrator session.
Then you switch-user to surf as a restricted user...