Task Manager Trouble

[P.Pilcher]

My local priest who does his best with computers but I suggest was a bit too enthusiastic when offered the opportunity to have his Dell laptop checked for spyware. He pressed the button and shortly afterwards presented me with a laptop running so many popups and warnings about spyware, trojans, and so on, I was suprised it was still running! After much scanning with loads of genuine scanning programmes over the last three days, his computer is at last running pretty normally. However, apart from deleting all his restore points, some of this malicious software also stopped him, as administrator, from running task manager. I can get it to run in safe mode from his account and if I create a new administrator, I can also get it to run. In normal mode, I am advised, when logged in on his administrator account "Task manager has been disabled by the administrator." When right clicking on the task bar, "task manager" is greyed out.
How do I turn it back on? I've been fiddling for a whole evening!

P.P.

[kenhughes]

It sounds like a worm that was doing the rounds a while ago.

If it is, in addition to the task manager not working, the firewall won't enable itself, anti-virus programs won't start and system restore won't work. Also, it prevents you from starting up in safe mode.

The only way I found to get rid of it was a complete reinstall of the operating system - though I didn't look too hard as I was thinking of doing a reinstall anyway, before that happened.

I don't know what else the worm did, but as it switched off the firewall (not just Windows, but my Sygate too), I can only assume it had installed a remote bot and was planning to use my system to run denial of service attacks along with thousands of others.

After-thought: If it's XP Pro (not sure about Home or any of the Vista flavours), click on Run and type in gpedit.msc - there's a lot of things in there you can set/reset.

[Tarq57]

If you have Superantispyware (http://www.superantispyware.com/download.html) installed (which is a darned good AS), it has a toolkit, listed in "prefereces>repairs" that claims to enable the task manager. It's the third repair down.

[kenhughes]

OK, found it in gpedit.msc.

User Configuration / Administrative Templates / System / Ctrl+Del+Alt Options. Double click on Remove Task Manager and if it's not already, set it to Not Configured.

If it's already set as that, or 'Disabled', then a reinstall is looking more likely.

[P.Pilcher]

Thanks guys. All defences were indeed down, but I have now managed to switch them back on. I'll be back on the case shortly and will report back with the results.

P.P.

[P.Pilcher]

Thanks again guys: Superantispyware fixed the problem as suggested.

P.P.