Recently installed Bufferzone Pro and it went bonkers. Before uninstalling, it caused my userprofile to disappear from the registry and I am now running my netbook as Administrator. All user profile settings need to be reset and searching the net seems an endless task. Need I say HELP?1 person needs an answerI do too

Have you tried performing a "System Restore" to a date/time before you had your problems?"How to restore Windows XP to a previous state" < http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306084 >HTH, JW

Tried a system restore before the time Bufferzone was installed, and then all the way back to the last successful one. "Sorry, windows is unable to restore" or some such gibberish...Plenty of anomalies; right now the cursor's disappeared... Several of the tray icons have gone as well. Bufferzone said that their programme was secure so looking for freeware, despite WOT supposedly tracking bad sites, I came up into 3 pages that were not dreadfully clean; Kasperski removed the threats. When Bufferzone was first installed, there was no functionality until I rebooted and it worked fairly well for a time, another reboot and everything went wonky. Since then I've downloaded a couple of progs that compare before and after images of registry. Not yet installed. Don't want to do a complete restore coz I've a compaq mini and it's too much of a hassle. System restore/rollback has been effectively buggered! Rilly want things to go back to normal. Can't understand what's goin on, but not ready to do a hijack this quite yet. MalwareBytes, Kasperski and ZoneAlarm are installed and everything seems clean... Any ideas?

Regarding System Restore... If you get the "unable to restore" message after it appears to work and it reboots, then you might get System Restore to work if you boot to Safe Mode (press F8 repeatedly as computer boots) and run the System Restore from Safe mode. This is a known problem when System Restore interacts with some Virus protection software.HTH, JW

Shall try that today. Found this on a MS forum "Resetting the Registry and the File PermissionsUsing SECEDIT.EXE (for Windows XP Professional)In Windows XP Professional, you may use the following secedit command-line to reset the file and registry permissions to defaults.secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verboseFor more information, see article How to reset security settings back to the defaults." Tried it and bloody nuffin! Still have admin as only user. Registry has both alt and default as admin; changed the default, rebooted and still there...Did a "Hijack This" and nothing out of the ordinary shows up; every one of the files listed are legit and can be accounted for. Since all the progs installed beforehand are under the user acct, copying them over to admin seems a bit of a waste of time.Would like to know why it happened, though and the sense of it. Are the programmers at Bufferzone that obtuse? If one chooses to rid oneself of a buggy prog, did they deliberately write code to set user as admin - as much to say "as admin, you are the one who's responsible..."Shall also try "Using SubInACLFor Windows XP Home Edition (and Professional Edition), you may use the SubInACL tool to reset the registry and file permissions. Download and then install the Subinacl.exe (~370 KB) from Microsoft. SubInACL is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, etc.Download reset.zip, unzip and run the reset.cmd file. This script resets the registry and file permissions in your system.Reset.cmd ContentsThe file reset.cmd contains the following lines:cd /d "%ProgramFiles%\Windows Resource Kits\Tools"subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=fsubinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=fsubinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=fsubinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive%\ /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f" which is still to be done; the file itself has been downloaded and is lurking, but after secedit was run to no advantage (were the registry files overwritten, ie the originals? ) one wonders if it's worth trying. Something like that must've happened because a certain quelque chose invisible is or has been fiddling about and jolly well deserves being flushed down the cyber effin drain - once and for all!Would it not be easier simply to reset things in the registry by hand? Using regJumper to go directly into the registry without having to wait eons for regedit to find the key, it's a simple enough job; it would be helpful, however, were one to know which keys... any ideas?

First of all, you say that the main problem is that your user profile has "disappeared from the registry". I assume that your profile files still exist in the "c:\documents and settings" folder. This being the case, you probably just have a "corrupted profile" although usually in such cases the login still remains but the system automatically creates a new, fresh profile. Corrupted profiles "just happen" and are not usually associated with any program.Using SECEDIT.EXE (for Windows XP Professional) [snip]" Tried it and bloody nuffin! Still have admin as only user. Registry has both alt and default as admin; changed the default, rebooted and still there...Whoa! The Secedit procedure restores Group Policies. I do not see you as having any group policy problems. I'm not surprised it didn't help.Download reset.zip, unzip and run the reset.cmd file. This script resets the registry and file permissions in your system.Reset.cmd ContentsOnce again I don't see you as having permissions problems. I doubt this will help you.What you really need to do is restore your registry to before the time that you had this problem. "System Restore" is the best way to do this. I always run it from Safe Mode because more often than not, it won't work any other way.The second best approach would be to try to recover your old profile. Here is a procedure that might work depending on the particulars of how your profile was corrupted:"How to recover the damaged user profile in Windows XP" < http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555473 >I would not go messing with registry permissions unless you have some indication of why this would be needed. Usually registry permissions are altered by malware and nothing you have said indicates that you have had a malware problem.If neither of those work, I would restore the registry manually from a backup in the System Volume Information folder -- but I don't think you're at that point yet.HTH, JW