Administrative Access denied to an Administrator??

[bklyngirl]

I am trying to help a long-distance friend who is having trouble with WinXP home edition on a brand new Dell Dimension... His system is set up to Autologon; He is the only user and he has Administrative rights... yet, when he recently downloaded Real Player and then tried to install it, he got an error message saying "Adminstrative Access to system registry denied"

Also, he was having trouble changing the display properties, so he went into control panel/system/device manager ... he got a message saying his graphics controller did not have its drivers installed... he opted to allow the
correct drivers to be downloaded... which they did, but again was denied access when the drivers attempted to install. We are totally stumped...
Administrators should have access to everything, right? Doesn't that include installing software/drivers?
THANKS IN ADVACNE FOR ANY HELP!
p.s. he's got norton system works for antivirus/firewall

[snowmonkey]

If it is a brand new Dell then I would suggest to do a clean install or use the Dell recovery CD in the drive and start over.....that would be best solution

Cheers

[Eiolon]

Your Norton's utilities could be blocking changes to the registry. Try disabling those tools before making the changes.

As the above User suggested - I always reformat Dell computers immediately after receiving them. This way you have a clean install with the necessary drivers only. Anything Dell would have pre-configured for your system would be gone.