Help! WinXP screw up

Factual Questions
1

I have done something to screw up my XP installation - not good…

Anyway, what I did was this:

  1. Create a new “limited user” account for my housemate
  2. Decide that I would like to enforce some security things, and go into control panel and start poking around. I couldn’t find what I wanted under “user accounts” so I look under “Administrative Tools”. There I find joy. Local Security Policy. THis is where I think I went wrong.
  3. I start playing with some settings under local security policy - basically tweaking anything that looks like what I want (which was to a) enforce complex passwords, b) require password rotation and c) require ctrl-alt-del to logon. I thought I’d done everything I needed to.
  4. At this time, using my norton security centre, I download the latest updates, which included some kind of security update (not virus defs). This requires a reboot which I do.
  5. I can’t login as my username. Oh dear. It says the administrator has disabled it. Only problem is that I’m the administrator. Now, when I built this PC I used the option to rename the “Administrator” account something else (on the basis that is would be more secure), so this PC doesn’t have an Administrator account, but at a loss, I try logging in as Administrator. It works!
  6. I go into “User Accounts” and my account and my housemates account are not listed. I use explorer to browse to c:\documents and settings\myusername - and I get a permission denied (I’m supposed to be administrator - how can it deny me?). I try to recreate my username, but it fails on the basis that the username already exists (in which case, why won’t it let me log in as me?). I try to go back and undo the changes I made in step 3. But I’m not sure I can remember them all. It doesn’t fix the problem.
  7. It’s after midnight, so I give up and go to bed.

So, Windows literate dopers - what next? Is this recoverable? I’m considering trying a reinstall of XP over the top and hoping like mad that my data stays in tact (and I can get to it afterwards) - I know, I should have backed up, but I didn’t get around to it, but that’s a pain, and my dad has the disks, so I’d have to go home to get them etc etc.

What else can I try?

2

it sounds like you can get into windows…so once you do go to start --> run. Type in restore.

you’ll get a list of files, double click rstrui.

you’ll get a GUI on restoring the system to an earlier time, (before you made the changes) follow directions and you’ll hopefully be fine

3

You might find your answer here. It is not an unusual problem.