chiefjay

Thanks for your helpful suggestions. Fireryone, that was some amazing stuff you put out there. I would never have figured out on my own how to do what you outlined. I downloaded a copy of Hiren's Boot CD at the suggestion of someone else. It apparently contains a whole host of really neat workarounds. Unfortuntely, the download was compressed in something with a .uha file extension and I couldn't find a program to uncompress the applications. At the end of the day, I tried to start the computer in safe mode and when i did, everything seemed back to normal, so I took a chance and rebooted the regular way, and everything seems ok. whatever was screwed up in the registry which prevented me from switching screen names was fixed upon re-boot. Sorry to have troubled everyone. I really appreciated your useful suggestions. Chief Jay

I know that while operating under my child's name, there is no way in which to go into Control Panel and change my daughter's permissions to those of an administrator, but is there a way to change a registry value or something, in which the same thing could be accomplished. I am thinking that if my daughter had administrator priveleges, I would not be prevented from doing a system restore. Any thoughts?

When I typed services.msc and then hit "ok", a Microsoft Management Console dialog box appeared with a yellow exclamation point in a triangle, with the message "failed to create empty document".

I haven't. I am not even sure what you mean. Are you suggesting that I re-start my computer in "safe" mode, and then locate the back up to my registry (which I created with CCleaner) and click the Merge command? Or are you suggesting that if I shut down my computer and re-start it in "safe mode", the System REstore command will not look to determine if the user has administrative priveleges and so will work under anyone's user account? As I mentioned in the first post above, I am concerned that if I re-start my computer, the existing inability to switch accounts might cause me to not be able to access anyone's account, and I will be locked out of my system. Is this not possible?

By the way, I should have indicated in my prior post that I am using the most current version of CCleaner, which I just downloaded last night.

I just ran the "issues" tool within CCleaner and wiped out a bunch of registry entries. I did this while logged in not under my own account, but under my daughter's XP account. When I finished, I realized that I am unable to switch between users anymore. When I click "log off" under the start menu, the dialog box is now transparent and does not contain words. I can see the 2 buttons, (one of which is used when the user wants to "logoff" and the other is for "switch user"). Although there are no labels associated with the buttons, I am familiar with the dialog box from memory. If I click "switch user", I am allowed to leave my daughter's account, but when I am at the page where all of the other user accounts are listed and I try to switch to any one of them, a message appears which says that Windows cannot switch accounts. It suggests that I try again, but that if the problem persists that I should re-start my system. I am concerned that if i restart that I won't be able to get into any of the user accounts, not even my daughters, and then I will be essentially locked out of my system. I decided that I should probably restore the old registry (which I had dutifully backed up.) However, when I went to merge the saved registry, a message appeared indicating that not all of the registry items could be restored, or something like that. After i attempted the merge, I went back to determine if i was now able to switch accounts, but unfortunately, I still cannot. My next thought was to do a system restore under XP. However, because my daughter does not have Administrator priveleges, and because I can't switch to my own user account (where I am the Administrator), I don't have the ability to use System Restore. I am starting to get panicky. Can anyone suggest a way out of this?