Ive broken my Vista Ultimate! Please Help!

Skeeter · 4 May 2007 at 11:00

Hi

Ive got a media PC that soley runs Media center on Vista Ultimate.

Seen as its for comunal used i made the media account password-less and then created another account as admin. i then hid this admin account from the welcome screen using the reg hack from XP. I then used the concurrent RDC hack so that you cannot log in as an admin at the actual machine, only remotely.

ive been having some problems with resuming and stuff, so i decided to update my chipset drivers. i did this, but now the drivers havent worked, and my network card is disabled! the media account cannot activate the network card, only an admin can, and i cant log in as admin unless the network is enabled!

does anyone have any ideas how i could get around this? the standard account cannot:

- turn back on UAC to have it prompt for a password
- change the registry value back
- enable the network card
- rollback the drivers
- run system restore
- turn on the ctrl-alt-del login feature

i can see no way out fo this except for a reformat!

phi1 · 4 May 2007 at 11:01

take the hd out.. Pop it in another box, take the files you need. Format and don't fiddle..

Skeeter · 4 May 2007 at 11:12

its a fairly new install n e way, so theres not much on it. its just ive spent the last week twaking and fiddling and tunning to get it stable....

oh well... looks like my evenings next week are taken now too!

phi1 · 4 May 2007 at 11:13

Press F8 while your booting, Then go into safe mode and try a system restore from there..

greeny_fastcar · 4 May 2007 at 11:17

Yeah F8 should allow you to log into the local admin account as it ignores the whole password thing usually.

marc2003 · 4 May 2007 at 11:21

Skeeter said:
its a fairly new install n e way, so theres not much on it. its just ive spent the last week twaking and fiddling and tunning to get it stable....

oh well... looks like my evenings next week are taken now too!

eh? takes me an hour or 2 max to get windows back on a machine and configured how i like it? :confused:

Skeeter · 4 May 2007 at 13:20

ive tried safe mode, system restore generates an error and the only account that i can log into is the media one, the admin one is fully hidden from the welcome screen, and i cant turn the welcome screen off!

its taken me a week of fiddling vista to get it to load up in under 10 mins, getting the drivers and codecs rite etc. its partly down to the fact that its all being done remotely from my other machine as i only have a single kb and mouse

jaric · 4 May 2007 at 14:02

If you log on with the media account can you do "Run as administrator" on regedt32 ? If so, you could undo your reg hack & re-instate the admin account on the welcome screen.