I’m an advanced Windows user (actually developer). Running Win XP Pro, SP1. It’s a laptop if that makes any difference.
Starting this morning, I’ve been getting “Access is denied” when trying to use certain commands from the command prompt - ‘ping’, ‘ipconfig’, ‘net’, maybe others. Even if I just type ‘ping’ with no arguments I get the error.
I’m logged on as an Administrator. After a reboot things are OK for a while, then I start getting the error. It could be I’m running some application that triggers it, though I’ve been unable to narrow it down. I seem to have only run “Outlook” and the problem appears.
I’ve checked the NTFS file permissions on ‘ping’, ‘ipconfig’ and I even allowed “Everyone” - no dice. WHen I double-click ‘ping’ from Explorer I get a similar error - “Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.” I can run other programs in the \System32 folder, both by double-clicking and from the command prompt - it seems to be the network-related ones that give me trouble. Nothing shows up in the Event Log.
I emphasize this only started happening today - the only thing I remember doing was running Windows Update.
I run “Windows Update” frequently and as far as I can see, I’m up to date on all the patches.
I’m up to date on virus software and signatures, as well as adware scanning.
I’ve searched the kb and the SDMB, as well as newsgroups - nobody seems to have had this problem.
Oh boy…if you are at a loss Q.E.D. it must be something obscure.
I just remembered a couple of other (maybe) salient points:
-I use the Cisco VPN client to get into the office VPN - it was misbehaving this morning so I uninstalled and reinstalled it
sometimes, after a while if I log off, when I try to log back on again, I get the “loading your personal settings” dialog (which usually follows a successful log-on) then it immediately logs me off and sends me back to the login screen! Again, a reboot fixes it.
These two things may be unrelated to the original problem but they also started happening today.
Since QED doesn’t have a cite, I don’t feel as bad about guessing randomly. Any indication of hard drive read error? Can you copy the ping program to another disk (even a floppy) and run it from there?
Randomly, I tried renaming “ping.exe” to something else (sping.exe) - and it worked! I could use sping.exe.
This made me suspicious - corrupting specific EXEs? This sounded like viral-like behavior. I checked my virus signatures, and sure enough - months out of date - the auto-update has not been functioning. I should have known - thank you, Computer Associates.
When I downloaded the latest virus software and signatures, eTrust found an outbreak of Win32/Pinfi.A which, sure enough, affects executables.
I guess noone could have answered this question since the original information I gave was flawed - my virus signature were not up to date like I thought they were. I bet once I clean up the infection everything will be OK. This probably explains all the weird behavior. :smack: