310. Keep you PC Secure Story

I love a challenge re PC problems. And did I ever get one yesterday. Have a friend you had a number of problems which I found were all caused by not securing his system from the hands and minds of kids. An older Windows XP system just doesn't have a simple one-step way of keeping the jewels safe as with Parental Controls in W7. Even though a Guest user Account existed, leaving an administrative account signed on or without a password to get on is asking for trouble. So, here are some tips and resolutions to some weird problems caused by a curious kid who had to click everything to see what it would do and then to change things also:

• High Contrast stuck on - Well, its hard to reset the Accessibility option High Contrast when the ICON is no longer in the Control Panel list. First I discovered how to get switched back from High Contrast to normal mode: Hold Alt+Left Shift+PrntScreen. It acts like a toggle. This made things look a little better, but the text was huge and wrapped while on the Internet. Simple fix to that was the View, then Text Size; set to normal.
• So far we had a text size problem, High Contrast problem, and a deleted Accessibility ICON in Control Panel. The last was fixed by copying Access.CPL from my XP system to his (into c:\Windows\System32 and rebooting. Voila, the ICON now appeared. However, now that it was back, I could examine the options within and found High Contrast was set on as a default whenever one of the users signed in. Had to uncheck it (Control Panel->Accessibility ICON, General, High Contrast. Problem fixed.
• Now to lock the kiddies out of the administrator account. Signin to administrator account, Control Panel, User Accounts. From here change all other accounts to user accounts and put passwords on the adult user accounts. A prompt was also give to secure private files -- selected that option too.
• Not quite done. The Guest Account used by one kid had to be set up to prevent Internet use. I removed all ICONS on Desktop except for games allowed, same for the Start Menu and Programs. I stopped there, although I could have found the Internet program itself and renamed it to hide it.
• Did I mention that the initial problem symptom was being unable to get to email? Looking into Outlook, I discovered no addresses set up for the service provider for POP3 ans SMTP. To make matters worse, when I tried to look at Yahoo mail, it too failed. Turned out the cookies were entirely blocked. I went through most of the key settings in Internet and reset to defaults, deleted temporary files and history, and rebooted. Finally back up on email. Unfortunately when problem presented itself, no useful messages led to cookies problem. I spent about 30 minutes crawling down network, Internet, and email setups. Arggggh!
• Did I say we were running? Not yet. With 1335 emails in INBOX the system was crawling too. It would have taken me all night to play yhe game of Yahoo Windows Classic email system email delete (check 25 at a time per page). The new Yahoo email offered a way within ACTIONS to select all messages entirely. Thus, goodbye 1335 messages, dating back to 2005, were deleted. I did go back to Classic though because I have found it faster and less cumbersome than Yahoo's new email.
• Then I installed CCleaner and cleaned all garbage files from the system, some 235 Mb of them and cleaned the Registry. Reboot and the system was finally back to initial speeds and working correctly.

So, DO only have one administrator Account and secure it! For me, troubleshooting and fixing is fun. For them, the problems were a nightmare for months. If I can help, go ahead and ask ... respond via comment.