Thursday July 29, 2010

GET YOUR COMPUTER FIXED RIGHT AWAY WITH NO EXPEDITE FEES

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SOLVED – Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file in xp pro

I was just working on a windows xp professional computer for a client which was heavily infected with viruses, including the infamous virut virus. We successfully cleaned it out of hundreds of infections leaving several intricate software installations intact… only to have the machine come right back into our shop for warranty service.

Though every user account on the computer booted up fine, of the three accounts, just one of them did not allow any programs to run on it. When trying to run anything from the actual executable file, from a shortcut, or from start->run, it would just say “Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file” which also affected dll files and made it virtually impossible to do anything with it. For example, control panel would open but then none of the items in control panel could be opened, nor could control panel be closed. Meanwhile, the other user accounts worked fine – just this one was causing problems.

There was, however, a loophole in the madness. Applications could be run by opening files which were set to run in those applications. For example, open a word file, and microsoft word opens. Therefore, I opened an html file to get internet explorer to run. Once it was running I could check the internet options. There the problem became quickly obvious. In the internet explorer security settings, normally there are four zones – intranet, internet, trusted, and restriced. Now there was only one zone – the normally hidden “My Computer” zone – and it was set to restricted, high security only. It would not allow me to change it.

After doing further research which led bascially nowhere and also investigating the group policy on the local machine, which apparently contained no abnormalities related to this issue, I finally decided to give up on trying to fix the offending user account.  The source of the problem was officially recorded as user registry corruption brought on by literally hundreds upon hundreds of prior, recent virus infections.

There was, nonetheless, in the end a simple fix: I simply logged in as administrator, created another user account, and copied over all the files from the defective user account into the new user account with the exception of the registry (ntuser.dat) file. So far it seems to be working great!

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