Argh! At work today a computer took ill. An XP SP2 Box, which had been working faithfully for the past 3 years, had suddenley decided to disallow its users from accessing any program executables through the desktop and via the control panel. This problem started occuring while I was away, so I wasn’t actually present to diagnose straight away. I could access some (generally non-microsoft) applications by forcing the program to run as an administrator, despite the fact that I was already logged on as an administrator.
It seems this error is quite common in XP land (as evidenced here), and I spent about two and half hours trying to solve it by following various suggestions posted around the internet.
Turns out, it was the virus protection - Trend Micro PC Cillan 2007. Something occured during an update of this application, and suddenley it messed with all the permission settings. So if you’re stuck on this error, try give this a go first.
Found an answer to this same issue that I was having. Another symptom was that I couldn’t run .exe files by double clicking in Windows Explorer but if i ran from a DOS prompt using short file names (c:\Progra~1\Sample~1\Progra~1.exe etc etc) then it worked fine. After much surfing around google etc I found that if I uninstall Internet Explorer Enhanced Security from Add Remove Windows Components then it all worked A-OK !
Cheers
SteveWaHa
December 11th, 2007
hi Steve. Yes, this problem seems to happen in a number of scenarios, most commonly in the scenario you describe in your example. It’s bloody annoying!
daz
December 12th, 2007