Administrator Accounts behave differently: Vista Home Premium

Hi,

I have two administrator accounts in Vista Home Premium and each behaves differently than the other.

I have some folders in the path /user that I want to delete, and one administrator account could do it and the other couldn't. I also wanted to stop a Windows service and one could and the other couldn't.

You see, mywebsearch had installed itself and Spybot wouldn't remove it, so I wanted to stop the service and delete the appropriate files, folders, and registry entries. This administrator thing is a bigger issue, though.

Why cannot one administrator do the same administrator things the other can?

I tried to fix it but the groups .msc that Vista refers to is not installed, or something (I don't really know what this is). I don't mind having one administrator that's a real admin account and a limited administrator, but in that case I need to swap these two accounts and I cannot swap them until I know how to activate administrator status for the one account that is not quite up to snuff.

Make sense?

In conclusion, I have two administrator accounts in Home Premium that behave differently; one is unable to delete /user files or stop services. I need to know how to fix that account and why these are unequal.

Thanks,

Sean

Hi Sean

It could be that one administrator seems to have lower access because it
can't get to the other administrators files.

Anyhow, if the spyware exists in just one user's profile then would it be an
option to delete that user and their profile folder?

James

"Sargent_Barley" wrote:

Could be; I'll have to check.

However, one administrator could stop the Windows service related to the spyware and the other could not.

Is there a way in Home Premium to see what group these administrators are in, if there are groups? And change the groups?

I'm not worried about the spyware. The anomalies with the administrator accounts--the inability of an admin to stop a service--has me much more worried.

Cheers,

Sean

Sargent

It could be that you have the Built-In Administrator account enabled. This
account is the named "Administrator".

Do you have User Account Control (UAC) disabled?
What, exactly happens when you try to disable the service with the weak
admin account?
Is this a clean install of Vista or an upgrade?

Vista Home versions do not have the advanced Users and Groups components.

--

Ronnie Vernon
Microsoft MVP
Windows Desktop Experience


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