Not a normal "This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect..."

[Norfolk'n'Clue]

Hiya,

Bit of a wierd one this...

2K SP4

Was playing Jedi Academy online last night, and there was a brief powerout. As my machine came back up again, after logon, all I got was desktop coloured background and the windows logon music. Then...nothing. Ctrl-alt-del was working, however. After messing about with task manager, I managed to get a desktop/start bar (ending the explorer process manually, run it manually, then run systray); Ran norton utilities, ran chkdsk, no problems found. On the reboot, could still only get desktop as mentioned above. When I try to run Zonealarm, I get the message: "This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator" Security settings for zonealarm.exe are correct, as are my admin priviledges. Still have internet connection. This error doesn't occur with the internet explorer tools bug.

Checked the group policy editor plugin on MMC, and everything seemed in order there.

I re-installed zonealarm, at which point it ran correctly. On reboot, it didnt start again, I tried to run it manually, again, I got the above error message. The other piece of software that is affected is NortonAV, which runs, but the systray icon doesn't popup. The NortonAV service is running in the process list; 'interact with desktop' is checked under services so the icon should be there.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Am going to try re-applying SP4, and installing ZA into a custom folder.

[Edit] Update: Uninstalling ZA now brings the desktop and start bar up as it should; Reinstalled ZA it worked fine. After a reboot, I get the error message 'This operation blah blah'"

Any ideas?

[Further Edit]: Uninstalled ZA, did a registry sweep, cleaned it out. Re-installed ZA. Strangely the icon will not run under and explorer shell, but run it from the command line, and it starts perfectly! so I've stuck ZA in a batch file that gets called by startup. This is prolly not as secure, but it works.

Any ideas?

p.s. how do you get the dos prompt to return after running a program that doesnt terminate immediately?

[Play_The_0dds]

this is the product of a corrupt registry, you can try norton system works, it's reg checker is ok, other then that, i dont explain reg settings. i do not want to make a situation worse than it is, so i dont offer advice in situations like these. it would be different if i had it in front of me, could look at it and pretty much tell. i see alot of people give info that could possibly cause trouble, but this is a open forum, they can offer what they like, just take any advice with a grain of salt, even mine.

[Norfolk'n'Clue]

ok dude, thanks. I backed the registry up; even if it is corrupt, it still works after a fashion. I'll try system works.