I’ve had a user account for my son set up for ages. It’s a “Limited User” and he’s been using it for just as long to get on the net and play games.
Well, I decided to password protect my account (The Admin) so he could play on it during the day, and to restrict access in case the babysitter got her hands on it. (I am forever fixing their PC because of SpyWare.)
Anyhoo, when I password protected the account, it asked me if I want to protect my files. I said “Yes” and went on. (I think this cause the problem, but who knows.)
Now, it seems, my son can no longer play games.
When he goes to play Diablo II it says the disk isn’t in the drive. But it is in the drive (And yes it is the original disk.) I pulled the LoD Expansion disk out and put it back in the drive and the AutoPlay kicked in and said that I need to install Diablo II before I can install the expansion. This is odd, as it has always worked before. For some reason, the system, under my sons account, doesn’t seem to think that Diablo II is even installed anymore! (But I can access the directory that the game is in.)
I reset the security settings on XP back to the default. I even uninstalled and reinstalled the game. Everything is fine under the Admin account, but it won’t run under the “Limited User” account like it used to.
What happened here? How do I undo it?
(I tried the “Run as Admin” and that seemed to work, but I’d have to give him the admin password and that defeats the purpose. Beside, I never needed to before.)
Help?
I can’t recall offhand what ‘limited user’ entails in XP, but perhaps you can try bumping up to a regular user. It sounds like he can’t access the software part of registry (among other things), and so the game won’t recognize it’s installed - and you say that his account can access the directory it’s held in, so that shouldn’t be the problem.
Since you can run as admin, but not as his account, it’s definitely an account restriction issue. It’s just a matter of how exactly the account is restricted.
First, bump his account to regular ‘user’, second, confirm that both the diablo directly and CDROM can be accessed by his account. (Right click on them in explorer, go to security, and add his name to the access list if it’s not there, or allow ‘everyone’ or ‘users’ to use them).
If neither of those works, post it, and I’ll think of what else needs to be checked.
I will try that.
I know there are different user levels, but when creating an account, it gives me two options Admin and Limited User.
A limited User can run apps, customise the look of XP, but that’s about it. They have NO system fuctions.
Ok, I’m home now and I played with the User settings.
He was a basic User, and I “upped” him to a Power User. The game acted teh same as before.
I then ‘upped’ him to an admin, and the game runs fine. (I would perfer not to have him as an admin though.
Ok. Some games not specifically designed to work well with NT/2000 require you to have the administrator account to run - because they make use of ‘system level’ commands that NT only allows to administrators. I’ve had to install games before where it says “Warning, you must run this from the administrator account”, and similar. Check the diablo 2 readme file, or maybe the tech support boards, and see if it’s diablo specifically that needs administrator rights to run.
I’ll check, but I never had any problems before.
Microsoft’s site lists D2 as a program that would use that work around…funny that it never needed it before…
Ah well… Thanks for the help. 