Executing Commands at Cmd Prompt Result in “Access Denied”

Question

I am running Windows 7.

Whenever I try to run commands like 'ping', 'ipconfig', 'taskkill', 'tasklist', etc from the command line I get an "Access is denied" message.

I checked the "Advanced Security Settings" for the Windows\System32 folder and the Owner was set to "TrustedInstaller". I changed the owner to "Administrators" but this did not seem to help.

Any ideas? I was previously able to execute commands at the cmd prompt without issue.

Answer 1

The user permission for the c:\windows\system32\ping.exe show that Users entry have Read & Execute permissions. All other users have Special permissions. I am not quite sure what this means.

Regardless, I performed a Windows Restore and that seemed to fix the issue. If anyone knows what could possible cause a problem like this please post.