I have a strange situation in vista premium. I work in a call center for HP and its on one of the test PC's we have on the floor for agents to use in troubleshooting. Here is the situation we can not access the administrator account in anyway, right clicking on cmd and run as administrator just opens it normally in control panel the 3 accounts listed are guest and two standard users the log on screen only displays these 3 accounts and the same goes for safe mode. If we try to change the account type it does absolutley nothing. I cant edit the registry because we cant run it as an admin. all of the net users commands fail because of access denied. I am personally at a loss other than doing a reinstall, but I wanted to see if there were any other ideas I didnt find anything even close to this situation on google so im looking for ideas as to how this happened or how to fix it.

Hi, Thank you for the post. It is normal that The built-in administrator account does not appear in the User Account panel. By default, the following conditions are true in Windows Vista: The built-in administrator account is disabled. The built-in administrator account cannot log on to the computer in safe mode. For more information, please refer to the KB article 926183 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926183). However, the system should have an administrator account, which was created when installing Windows Vista. If there is only standard user account displayed, I am afraid that the administrator account was removed or changed to standard user accidently. Regarding the issue that right clicking on cmd and run as administrator just opens it normally, it can occur if UAC is disabled in Windows Vista. The system will not prompt for administrative credential even thought you select run as administrator. This means the cmd.exe is still launched as non-administrative credential. Thank you for your understanding. Sincerely, Joson Zhou Microsoft Online Community Support