Women - can't live with them.
:rolleyes: Mrs |ce decided it was time to get festive in the |3lack|ce household. It's the holiday season after all. To add to my newfound/forced Christmas season cheer, she downloaded a nifty little screensaver to my (baby, 1st love, don't f*** with this box) machine and installed it. Thinking she'd done me a service, she put it up to activate - since I'm usually at this desk for hours at a time, it was a few days before I left the computer idle long enough for it to kick in...
So yesterday morning between hold 'em tourneys, I got up to answer the call of nature and get myself another cup of coffee... I start hearing one of the themes from the Nutcracker playing in the background, the annoyingly loud noises emerging from my study like an unwanted fart. I rushed back in, saw the screensaver, growled a bit, deactivated it, switched it off permanently, then went to uninstall...
"You do not have permission to access this file." Yah, right. Bullshirt. run-cmd-at xx:xx /interactive taskmanager... time for the system rights trick I learned right here (Much thanks White Scorpion!).
So I run through the procedure, grant myself full system rights, uninstall the bloody screensaver - noticed in the uninstall that it's made by 'Wild Tangent.' Yah, ok, being the good spyware killer I am, I know that they're notorious... loadup spybot, kill the wild tangent that's rampant in my machine, rock right on.. no huhu, then reboot to get back to my normal rights.
Call it a sixth sense, but I could feel something very wrong as win XP slooooooowly reloaded itself and brought up my login screens. I got frisky, decided to login to Administrator and see wtf was going on... entered my password. Invalid. ouch!
entered it again. nope, no dice. So I login to my normal user account and did a quick check through net command...sure enough, the password to my Administrator account had been changed on 11/4. A quick check with Mrs. |ce, who'd heard me growling and came in to check on me, revealed that this was the same day she'd installed the screensaver. *fume*
Ok, time for a bit more drastic stuff. I'll reboot, bring it to command only, go into SAM and fix the damn password....
WRONG!
Box reboots again - this time it's locked. No command mode, no safe mode, no nothing, and it's telling me that it's missing the user accounts file and to contact my system administrator. "I AM the system administrator you piece of scrap iron!"
Long story short - don't get the bloody 'Holiday Screensaver by Wild Tangent' if you're that moronic to do it after all this - and tell your minions not to do it either - The fix involved a full reinstall of XP (no repair option, I didn't have the admin password to get console), then hasty migration of old settings from the backup files I keep to get me back to where I was 3 months ago (bye bye sp2, bye bye dvd decoders *fume*).
Laugh, Laugh really hard at my misery. I hope Mrs. |ce learned her lesson. I sure did, she just lost all install/delete rights forever on my baby.
[edit] As a postscript, I really should add that Mrs |ce made it up to me. Steak dinner at Outback, and a good hour-long massage soothed the savage beast, topped off by a promise never to try to install anything new on my baby ever again (heh she can't anyway.) :rolleyes: [/edit]
