TimRude

I'm a computer repair tech who's run into a head-scratcher. Dell Dimension 8200 desktop w/XP Home SP2 system comes in for repair. No sound. Sound drivers for onboard audio are all installed and show no errors in device manager. Just no sound. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling fresh drivers from Dell. All ok in device manager but still no sound. So I think - maybe onboard sound has fizzled. So then I tried installing a new sound card and drivers after first disabling onboard sound in BIOS. New card installs fine, ok in device manager, but still NO SOUND! Before you ask - of course I've done the obvious things. I checked the speakers. Even tried multiple sets of speakers. I've also made sure that all of the volume controls in the system tray mixer are up and un-muted. I've checked to make sure that the Audio Codecs listed in device manager match those on a working XP machine. They do. Windows thinks it's working. Shows the speaker icon in system tray. If you play an MP3 or wav in Media Player, it acts like it's playing. Just no actual sound comes out of any program or utility. Any ideas here?

FYI for anyone who cares: I've gotten info from Mark Renoden on the Windows Platform Support Team at Microsoft that what I'm trying to do isn't really supported. However he suggested using Group Policies and then disabling the read access for the Admin acct, to prevent the group policies from being read and applied at login. I also found the same suggestion and procedure here: Group Policies: Applying to Specific Users It takes some tinkering but it seems to work pretty well. If anyone's got better ideas I wouldn't mind hearing them, but otherwise I think I can do it this way. Tim Rude

I'm afraid I don't quite understand this suggestion. Can you elaborate a little? How? I don't see anywhere in the Group Policy editor to specify whether the restrictions apply to "Guests" only. It seems to be all or nothing. Tim Rude

Thanks. I've done that. The User account is a member of the 'Users' group, whereas the Administrator account is a member of the 'Administrators' group. However, that still doesn't block everything I want to block. I can see where this would be useful to prevent (for example) User access to REGEDIT or certain other apps. But I want to actually remove certain things from the UI, such as the entire 'Settings' menu, blocking the right-click menu on the desktop, blocking the right-click menu on the taskbar, etc. Tim Rude

I've got a stand-alone (non-networked) Windows 2000 Pro machine with only two accounts - one Administrator (with a password) and one User (no password). Windows is set to auto-login to the User account at boot up. I want to lock down the User account to disable stuff like the Control Panel, Display settings, Taskbar settings, etc. However, I want to leave these things enabled when logged in under the Administrator account. Using the Group Policy editor, I can disable what I want but it affects both accounts. How can I selectively apply the Group Policy settings to only the User account? TIA Tim Rude

Version 2.24 running on Win2K SP4. Whenever I click on either the button with the green "+" sign on it or the "MSFN Support Forums" hyperlink on the main program screen, I get an "Unhandled exception has occurred in your application ... The system cannot find the file specified" error message. (BTW, what is the green "+" button supposed to do, anyway? Some tooltips on the buttons might be nice.) Following is the 'Details' info provided by the error dialog after clicking the green "+" button, and below that is the 'Details' info provided by the error dialog after clicking the forum hyperlink label. AFTER CLICKING GREEN "+" BUTTON AFTER CLICKING HYPERLINK LABEL: