vista home & \windows\system32 folder

[rancid]

Hi,

By default, does Vista Home allow files to be written to the "c:\windows\system32" folder?

I have logged in as "administrator" and when I tried copying a file to the "systems32" folder, it says that I do not have write access.

The administrator rights had not been meddled with. Is this a "new" feature of Vista Home?

Apologies as Vista Home is a new environment to me. I'm more familiar with XP.

Does anyone know how to overcome this?

Thanks in advance.

[redwudz]

It should always ask that, but you can usually try again and be able to write some files to the System 32 folder. A dll or a system type of file normally has a program placing them there. Probably depends on your security settings also. I have replaced damaged dll files in a Vista system.

Any particular reason you would want to write directly to the System 32 folder? You can cause a fair amount of system damage that way.

[rancid]

Hi redwudz,

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I'm trying to replace a file there. Here's what happened :

This system was recently infected by a "coolwebsearch" spyware/malware which Spyware Terminator successfully detected and removed.

After this, everytime I shutdown or startup, there'll be a system popup that complains that "logonui.exe - unable to locate component".

I'm suspecting that the spyware may have somehow corrupted the "logonui.exe". As I have a "clean" copy of logonui.exe (from another PC), I'm hoping to overwrite the corrupted one but so far without any success as Vista doesn't allow me to replace it in the system32 folder.

[classfour]

Have you gone to Programs and checked for "coolwebsearch" right clicked and "uninstall"?

[redwudz]

He probably damaged any uninstall, if it even had one, already.

One way to do this, but maybe a bit risky, is to use a bootable disk. Set your BIOS to use a CDROM drive as first boot. Linux distros have quite a few bootable variations. You could also use a Windows PE disk or similar.

Bart PE: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ or http://www.skeeterbytes.com/ultimatecd.htm

Once you have booted into the temporary OS, you can modify any part of the original OS. I would back up any irreplaceable data first, though.