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Task manager has been disabled by your administrator
The first problem I ran into in cleaning up after my infested Windows XP image was this error message. One of the first things I do in cleaning an infested system is try to kill off running process t…
The first problem I ran into in cleaning up after my infested Windows XP image was this error message. One of the first things I do in cleaning an infested system is try to kill off running process that look suspect (or at least identify them.) On using ctrl-alt-delete I got the message "Task manager has been disabled by your administrator" To be honest I haven't seen that one before and it sent me Googling...
It turns out it's an easy fix. There is a registry key that can be set to enable/disable the task manager. There are a number of ways to fix (open regedit and navigate to the key and change it, download a .reg file and run it, or the following....) I found the most convenient to be to do the following....
Go to Start.... Run... type in this (without quotes) "REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableTaskMgr /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f"
Fortunately the run menu remembers what you've used previously, as I had to repeat this after each reboot for a time. (Until I killed off all the pests from loading at boot.) The above worked to allow me to ctrl-alt-delete and get the task manager. After which I started looking for suspicous processes running.