Right on, now's the time to laugh at Vorlin, hehe. I helped a friend install windows 2000 and all related patches about two months ago. All was fine. Several small patches during the interim and nothing's gone wrong. She went on vacation over the past week and her son (a good friend of mine) was surfing on her machine Friday and Saturday. He swears up and down that he didn't do anything except go to several computer parts sites (he's in the case-looking mode) and conversion charts (mm to inches). On Opera, so it wasn't anything through IE downloading, etc.

On Friday, all was fine. On Saturday, he said he couldn't get to any website (that doesn't necessarily mean anything in this problem, but it could be related). He got a rundll.exe fault which popped up the "Send error report?" message, but he didn't think to read it all at the time. The box is then shut down.

Fast forward to today. He tries to start her machine up and at the login prompt, after logging himself in, he gets this message:

"The local security policy on this machine does not permit you to log in interactively."


I've done all the looking up I can do and every answer requires either an rconsole or domain admin account to fix. I'm not familiar with rconsole in windows environments nor is this machine on a domain (small network, IP based, nothing extravagant).

What am I looking at doing to fix this? Will a reinstall over the top fix it? Will the repair console do anything? I've found several sites that show fixes, but they're all domain-related from what I've seen.

Thanks in advance!