Thank you for the extended and thorough discussion, Vang and Tim.
You've given me plenty to work with.

Just one point about having Administrator Account to have in case of
failure. I go to great lengths to always have a recent clone of my full
hard drive partition, on another drive. If and when I require it, I
simply reboot to the slave drive, and update a few appropriate
directories as needed.

Bill

Tim Meddick wrote:
Sorry all!

Didn't pay enough attention - assumed the OP was trying to "disable"
Messenger from "Local Services" on the Administrator Tools menu.

As you say, Vanguard, he used MSConfig.exe, and I don't even know if the
ideas I gave for accessing the Administrator account will work in "Home"
edition?

Someone might enlighten me on that point - or you could give the
suggestions a go anyway, William.


The "runas" command would simply look like this for [msconfig.exe]....

runas /user:Administrator "c:\windows\system32\msconfig.exe"

==

Cheers, Tim Meddick, Peckham, London. :-)




"VanguardLH" wrote in message
...
William Lurie wrote:

Tim Meddick wrote:

William Lurie wrote ...

While attempting to stop MSN Messenger from loading during startup, I
uncheck it from Startup list and get "Access denied while
attempting to
change a service. You may need to log on using Administrator
Account to
make changes". Booting to Safe Mode and signing in as Administrator
(and
only user), I still get that message. I figure there must be a KB
article on this..........

Try logging in as Administrator and NOT in SAFE Mode...........

Thanks, Tim, but the only way I know of to log in as Administrator is
F8Safe mode.

Oh, you are using the Home edition of Windows XP. You didn't mention
that so we had to guess from your reply because of how Home makes you
use safe mode to log into the Administrator account. See
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=290109.

"I uncheck it from Startup list". So we are to guess WHERE you happen
to uncheck the startup item? Might it be when using msconfig.exe? If
so, after getting the error message, exit and reload msconfig.exe. See
if the item you were told that you couldn't modify has actually been
modified. That is, reload msconfig.exe to check if the item got
disabled despite the error message. I've seen that message a couple
times but the change got made anyway.

Be aware that msconfig.exe only shows some of the common startup
locations in Windows, not all of them. If you want a more comprehensive
tool showing all startup items, get SysInternals' AutoRuns.

To find if Microsoft has a KB article, go to there site and do a search.
The problem is that Microsoft wants to shove their web-based forum posts
into their search results which are usually of little value and severely
dilute the usable results from their search. Oh yeah, you're looking
for help articles from Microsoft to only get the results polluted with
forum posts which many not get answered or have wrong or least-best
advice. So I use Google to search Microsoft's support site and use the
"site:" operator to narrow the search to just Microsoft's support site,
as in:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:support.microsoft.com+%2Bmsconfig+%2 B"access+denied"


If you don't like the articles found, you can then remove the site
parameter and search everywhere to see if you find more helpful
articles. I did the search at Microsoft's site but nothing looked
promising by its title or the snippet for it. I removed the site
operator and got other articles that may be more relevant to you. But
did you check if your change actually got rejected (by exiting and
reloading msconfig to see if your change was accepted or ignored)?

By the way, you should only be using the Administrator account in an
dire emergency. A separate admin-level account should get created and
you use THAT one for you admin tasks. Keep the Administrator account in
reserve as a backup in case you can't use your own admin-level account.
If all you have for an admin-level account is the Administrator account,
how are you going to perform admin tasks should the Administrator
profile get corrupted and you can no longer login to it? One of the
first tasks you should perform after the installation of Windows is to
create a different admin-level account and then use that one for your
admin tasks.