My Windows Vista Home Premium box has always been doggy, so tonight I went through and changed a bunch of processes from Automatic startup to Manual. Well, my machine now runs snappy as can be, but unfortunately, I seem to have made the fatal mistake of disabling the service that grants a user sufficient administrator privileges to perform routine administrative functions. Consequently,
even on my admin account, my Control Panel no longer works -- at all; I can no longer edit my startup programs; Windows Defender refuses to initialize; and other problems are cropping up.
Windows Vista has no equivalent process, so I didn't expect that disabling it would wreak this kind of havoc. Why does an administrator account need additional privileges anyway?
Is there any way for me to re-enable this service through some other means? Failing that, would someone be willing to scroll through the description column of Services menu to find which service grants these extra privileges, so I can describe my problem more efficiently to a service tech?
If I can't perform routine administrative maintenance on my machine, it's going to become virtually useless as time goes on.
But hey, at least it runs faster now, right?