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Unable to use Control Panel

A known group of viruses can disable access to Control Panel, Task manager, and RegEdit. You will get the message: … has been disabled by your Administrator. This is not a fake message but a message from windows which means that a policy has been set in the registry to prevent you from accessing these needed utilities.

To correct:

- Update and run your antivirus software. If you do not have a valid update and are a home user, try AVG Free. If the virus prohibits you from downloading the antivirus or updates, use another computer and a flash drive (the little usb drives that are readily available) and “download and save” to that device. Then insert into the affected machine, install, and scan for viruses.

Once this is done, you may still get the disabled message. To correct, Microsoft has a document KB913623 that suggests the following (WARNING: If you do not know how to make changes to the registry-seek qualified help).


			Unable to use Control Panel A known group of viruses can disable access to Control Panel, Task manager, and RegEdit. You will get the message: … has been disabled by your Administrator. This is not a fake message but a message from windows which means that a policy has been set in the registry to prevent you from accessing these needed utilities. To correct: - Update and run your antivirus software. If you do not have a valid update and are a home user, try AVG Free. If the virus prohibits you from downloading the antivirus or updates, use another computer and a flash drive (the little usb drives that are readily available) and “download and save” to that device. Then insert into the affected machine, install, and scan for viruses. Once this is done, you may still get the disabled message. To correct, Microsoft has a document KB913623 that suggests the following (WARNING: If you do not know how to make changes to the registry-seek qualified help).		Start by going into safe mode, the Administrator. Make the following RegEdit corrections. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer NoControlPanel set to 0 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Policies\System DisableTaskMgr set to 0 DisableRegistryTools set to 0 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer NoControlPanel set to 0 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Policies\System DisableTaskMgr set to 0 DisableRegistryTools set to 0 Once this was done, most of the functionality came back. The two issues I still had were that the original user cannot edit the registry and the network adaptor would not get an IP address.