Windows XP Media Center

MothballsWallet

Okay, got a question here, it's really just to confirm my thoughts.

Friend of mine's daughter has a Sony Vaio laptop that has Windows XP Media Center on it, wired and wireless network adapters (former is made by LAN-Express, latter is made by a company called Marvell).

Now, I used the Avira AntiVir rescue CD to clean the system of viruses, took off the McAfee they had installed because only the Privacy Control component was installed and running, no antivirus protection.

I took the Spybot and MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (MBAM) versions off there and put on the latest ones.

Now, the wired and wireless network controllers were showing the yellow dots with exclamation marks and a status message saying "driver is missing or corrupted", but I don't think it is as I double-checked (thankfully, the drivers are copied onto the hard drive).

They have 3 user accounts on the system: one for my friend's daughter (no password), another for her husband (no password) and a third that's also for her husband (with password), all set as administrator. They can't remember the password for the third account, so I can't get into that.

Am I right in thinking that if you set a Windows XP Administrator account up with no password, you don't have full access permissions because Regedit won't work, and driver updates/reinstallations won't work either?

All help appreciated.

damo24

Not sure what's causing the problem but setting up an administrator account with or without a password will allow you to run regedit and driver updates. The only difference a password makes is protecting users documents.

chunter

If you boot into safe mode, there should be a 4th account, administrator.
you can reset passwords there.,

Download the McAfee removal tool.
It's reminants may be messing with your Windows firewall.

MothballsWallet

Would the McAfee remnants be messing around with the network drivers as well?