- Joined
- Mar 7, 2004
- Location
- Phoenix, since 03/2014
I'm trying to fix my friend's laptop. One of her sisters ended up letting some spyware in and now it's screwed up to an extremely impressive level. I've never encountered a problem I couldn't fix in the past with enough Google searching, but I'm at a standstill with this one.
It's a Gateway W730-K8X (AMD) running XP Home SP2 and it appears to at least have this.
All of my normal avenues of attack are blocked. First of all, it blocks exes from being run, so no taskmanager, virus/malware scans, custom removal tools, or anything else useful that would fix it.
Second, whenever I try to get into regedit (in general; although part of the fix includes adding something to the registry), I get "registry editing has been disabled by your administrator". The user IS administrator with full rights. I read about changing this via Group Policy Editor, but XP Home doesn't come with it. So I read about how to add it to XP Home, but after I did that, same story. The legit regedit exe seems to be there and there's no regedit.com anywhere (I read that com files have priority over exe files?).
Third, no safe mode. Whatever file tries to load after agpcpq.sys fails and the computer reboots into normal mode. I read that ntbtlog.txt is a log that would show which files loaded and which files failed, but I can't find this file anywhere (which is supposed to be in C:\).
So, no exes, no taskmanager, no regedit, and no safemode (unless I can figure out what file is failing and fix it). chkdsk with various flags is clean. I've never seen a computer so massively and completely crippled.
I know that at this point one should just reinstall XP and that might be what I end up having to do, but, I really want to figure this out for the principle of the matter, for peace of mind, and for the experience.
So, I'm at a loss at the moment, and any help is appreciated. If I could just get either regedit or safemode working, I'd be ok.
It's a Gateway W730-K8X (AMD) running XP Home SP2 and it appears to at least have this.
All of my normal avenues of attack are blocked. First of all, it blocks exes from being run, so no taskmanager, virus/malware scans, custom removal tools, or anything else useful that would fix it.
Second, whenever I try to get into regedit (in general; although part of the fix includes adding something to the registry), I get "registry editing has been disabled by your administrator". The user IS administrator with full rights. I read about changing this via Group Policy Editor, but XP Home doesn't come with it. So I read about how to add it to XP Home, but after I did that, same story. The legit regedit exe seems to be there and there's no regedit.com anywhere (I read that com files have priority over exe files?).
Third, no safe mode. Whatever file tries to load after agpcpq.sys fails and the computer reboots into normal mode. I read that ntbtlog.txt is a log that would show which files loaded and which files failed, but I can't find this file anywhere (which is supposed to be in C:\).
So, no exes, no taskmanager, no regedit, and no safemode (unless I can figure out what file is failing and fix it). chkdsk with various flags is clean. I've never seen a computer so massively and completely crippled.
I know that at this point one should just reinstall XP and that might be what I end up having to do, but, I really want to figure this out for the principle of the matter, for peace of mind, and for the experience.
So, I'm at a loss at the moment, and any help is appreciated. If I could just get either regedit or safemode working, I'd be ok.