Task Manager Disabled?

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A laptop was brought into me this morning and it was declared it had aids (damn russian porn sites).  After removing said infection it was found that certain registry keys had been tampered with among which was preventing the task manager from being run with the message;

the task manager has been disabled but the administrator

obviously thats a load of rott as I have better things to do with my time.

I offer the following three methods of dealing with this, the 3rd is the direct route but the others are a good idea to reset permissions in general to a out of the box state.

1.  Run the following command from a command prompt to check and reset the registry values and file permissions;

secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose

2. Run the following to rebuild the security database from the initial template;

secedit /configure /db junk /cfg “c:\windows\security\templates\setup security.inf” /overwrite /quiet

3.  The direct path to fix the actual Task Manager Key, just paste this into the run box.

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableTaskMgr /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

I also had to set all the zones in IE back to defaults to allow the user to be able to download etc…

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