Administrator ideas

[pixelcide]

I recently had some annoying spyware i had to get rid of on my Windows 7 operating system (don't worry its gone now) and i noticed that some of the newer spyware had a little trick where it disables a lot of Windows actions. Regedit, folder options, and system restore all turned off. They claimed i wasn't the administrator even though i was logged in as the administrator.

I managed to get regedit permission again by running another program after the spyware was gone. When i ran spybot, it played right into the whole spyware scheme and said i wasnt the administrator and couldn't turn on system restore because of that reason.

At the time, i didn't even think of right clicking the program and selecting "running as administrator" (btw, why doesn't it mention trying that in the error message you get?), instead i went into the registry and changed the one "System Restore Disabled" registry key back from "1" to "0" and bam i could do System Restore again.

Shouldn't spybot be able to know the difference between someone logged in as a regular user and admin user that had a few registry keys changed by some spyware? I mean it still said Administrator in my user account description and everything.

[Zenobia]

On Windows 7 and Vista,Spybot normally isn't run as administrator when you launch it.If you want to run Spybot as admin,you have to rightclick and select "run as administrator"That wasn't caused by your spyware problem.
There's more info here:
http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=55946
Some info about UAC for Windows 7 here:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/11584/understanding-user-account-control-in-windows-7/
hth. :)