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Starting a few days ago, I am facing a very weird issue here on my Windows 8.1 workstation. I am unable to start programs or applications that require administrator privileges. This makes my PC completely unusable at the moment, because I cannot even run "taskmgr.exe" or edit user profiles (which is the reason, I am asking). The only thing working are "usual" programs, like my browser.

What happens whenever I am trying to start a program as administrator is, that there's a horribly long timeout where nothing happens, followed by the message quoted below:

Windows cannot find 'C:\Windows\system32\taskmgr.exe'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.

I found many sites suggesting many things... things like:

sfc /scannow

dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

runas /user:Administrator /profile "cmd.exe"

or enabling the built-in administrator

net /user:administrator /active:yes

However, all of these approaches are requesting administrator privileges and thus are not working.

Is there any way, I can try to fix this problem without reinstalling Windows (which appears to be my last option at the moment...)?

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  • Can you run system restore?
    – Wutnaut
    Sep 24, 2014 at 16:10
  • @Wutnaut: I tried this too, but my boot image is somehow not recognized as such. I keep trying this anyway... any other hints would be nice!
    – Aschratt
    Sep 24, 2014 at 16:12
  • Can you find C:\Windows\system32\tasmgr.exe?
    – lzam
    Sep 24, 2014 at 16:24
  • Is this your personal computer, or a company resource? If the latter, go with the coffee & donuts solution suggested by @YetiFiasco. If the former, it's probably time for a rebuild anyway. Some very restrictive UAC configurations can prevent you from being able to run commands that require elevation without already being in an elevated session (e.g.: use an elevated CMD prompt instead of Start->Run), but you usually won't see that at home.
    – Iszi
    Sep 24, 2014 at 16:25
  • When you ran those commands. What error exactly did you receive? Update your question to include it.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 24, 2014 at 16:26

1 Answer 1

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Finally I got this to work without reinstalling or refreshing windows!

I restarted the PC (by holding Shift while clicking Restart) and switched to safe mode using Advanced Options. From here I was able to run (at least) my console as administrator. This enabled me to run sfc /scannow which told me that there was indeed an error that will be fixed after reboot.

And it did!

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