Vista - Weird Admin Account Issue

I've had a few problems with my hard drive (I knew it was dicey BEFORE
installing Vista), and tried going into the admin account (via Safe Mode) to
fix a few things. Oddly, upon trying, I got a message stating that the Admin
account was disabled.

Rebooted normally, then went to Users from the Computer Management Console.
Yep, Admin was disabled. Re-enabled, then rebooted, and got into the
account.

Ok -- the first odd thing was that all the desktop and Control Panel icons
were all too close together, partially overlapping one another. Auto-Arrange
didn't help, nor did Align-To-Grid. I could manually move them apart, but
that was the only solution.

The next thing was that the system tray clock was in military time mode, and
when I took a closer look, saw a bunch of foreign characters in it's window.
Turned out that the Admin account was configured for Turkish instead of
American!

I know no one else got into the system (locally, at least), as it's just my
wife & I, and she hasn't neither the knowledge, interest, nor patience to do
such a thing. This was the first time I'd entered the Admin account. I use
the Vista 2-way firewall, UAC, and a hardware firewall. I'm also a computer
tech with 30 years experience, so while it's not impossible that my system
was remotely compromised, it's not likely.

Any ideas? I fixed everything except the graphics issue (which isn't a
problem under my or my wife's logon account, and never was), but am still
curious. Just a MS glitch? A corruption due to the hard drive problems?

Sounds like your hard drive is messing up Vista...



Bill F.

"jwardl" <jwardl@spamthis.com> wrote in message
news:5CBD4AB1-92F9-4E77-B8BB-C4047303E5B3@microsoft.com...
> I've had a few problems with my hard drive (I knew it was dicey BEFORE
> installing Vista), and tried going into the admin account (via Safe Mode)
> to fix a few things. Oddly, upon trying, I got a message stating that the
> Admin account was disabled.
>
> Rebooted normally, then went to Users from the Computer Management
> Console. Yep, Admin was disabled. Re-enabled, then rebooted, and got into
> the account.
>
> Ok -- the first odd thing was that all the desktop and Control Panel icons
> were all too close together, partially overlapping one another.
> Auto-Arrange didn't help, nor did Align-To-Grid. I could manually move
> them apart, but that was the only solution.
>
> The next thing was that the system tray clock was in military time mode,
> and when I took a closer look, saw a bunch of foreign characters in it's
> window. Turned out that the Admin account was configured for Turkish
> instead of American!
>
> I know no one else got into the system (locally, at least), as it's just
> my wife & I, and she hasn't neither the knowledge, interest, nor patience
> to do such a thing. This was the first time I'd entered the Admin account.
> I use the Vista 2-way firewall, UAC, and a hardware firewall. I'm also a
> computer tech with 30 years experience, so while it's not impossible that
> my system was remotely compromised, it's not likely.
>
> Any ideas? I fixed everything except the graphics issue (which isn't a
> problem under my or my wife's logon account, and never was), but am still
> curious. Just a MS glitch? A corruption due to the hard drive problems?
>