I cleaned up the text a little to hopefully remove some of the confusion. Again, this trick is only useful for pre-Vista versions. If you have Vista, you already have this ability built-in.

Thank you for the tip.

I provide free support to all of the Windows XP systems run by each member of my family in my area (eight computers).

One user refuses to assign a password to either of the two user accounts and uses the login screen instead of the CTRL+ALT+DEL “classic” login screen. Both accounts run with full administrative privileges. (The computer contains financial information and one of the users died of cancer in 2006.)

The other users insist that a standard user account is “too inconvenient” and their accounts are administrative accounts.

I always have one of these computers at my house, because Widnwos XP has been rendered nonfunctional by malicious software that slipped past security software (AVG free for my “repeat customer”). I can rarely recover data, but I can often identify the “payload” of the malicious software; in every case, the “masware” needed to be on an administrative account. On a regular user account, it would have remained inert.

For years, I have been warning of the security risks associated with running with administrative privileges, but I have been ignored. I have persuaded the users of AVG Free that free security software is a risk, but our broadband ISP provides McAfee’s security suite free to subscribers, which brings the two 512-MB PCs to their needs. (Fortunately, 512-MB of additional RAM for these 2004 Pentium 4s is $20 USD.)

I would think that my security warnings would be heeded by users who have repeatedly lost most of their data, and the use of their computers for at least two days (because of recovery time), so I will try ’su’ for Windows XP on the PC I currently am restoring. I suspect that I will receive protests and complaints, however.

I automatically assumed, www2, that David is referring to the “root” directory, not the ‘root’ account.

For example, the main root directory on the system drive/partition is ‘C:’ and the root for the programs directory is typically ‘C:\Program Files’.

Cordially,

David