HP Pavilion "Owner" account.

I have been working on a friends HP Pavillion 7935. I have spent about two weeks cleaning this computer of virus' and spyware. The system has six accounts on it, so it has made my work tedious, and redundant. The system has an "Owner" account in Windows XP Home, which I learned is standard. I need to get into that account to clean it up. But it is locked, and I cannot clean the bad files that are in it's directory. I could crack the account, but I don't want to. Does anyone know how to get into this account?

 

Hey Close,

I found this interesting tidbit on Techspot. Supposedly, since XP Home doesn't display the security tab unless booted to safe mode this may be of service.

The idea is to logon with administrative privileges, rt clk the drive selecting properties, security tab. Clk advanced selecting the Owner tab, tick the "Replace Owner" checkbox and select the account you logged on with. OK to exit.

Sound like a plan?


GF

 

Thanks Global. Good to hear from you again. I'll give this a spin.

 

That did the trick. Thanks. It was a bit tedious because of all the directories and files. There are three accounts on the system; mom, and two children. I made the mother the owner of everything and made her the only member of the Administrators group.

The kids had Morpheus, Kazaa, and "you name it" spyware installed. I will never understand how they do that.

I noticed that Morpheus 2.0 hid itself in the Sun JRE (Java Runtime Environment) directory. What's with that? I just uninstalled JRE, and deleted the directory.

I should start charging people for this. If they knew my hourly rate, they'ld just buy a new computer and screw that one up.

 

Wow! That's great!

Was kind of a longshot never having tried it myself, then again I have a hard enough time securing my own computer.
I'm sure one Administrator is enough on that particular system nevermind moms "little helpers!"
Interesting to note the Morpheus location although possibly a fluke guessing the kids know more than mom?
I hope she offered you a cold beer for your services?

Anyway, alway's good to see you helping out here Close, and happy to have come up with the right kind of help for you.
Would have replied sooner but blew out my TCP stack mess'in around with drivers ....

Stay good!


GF