[MrCoffee]

ok so this morning I screwed up my computer, this is what I did:

I was going to defrag all my drives so I selected them all and then accidentally hit the security tab.. then worse still I hit the button on the popup box by reflex - I'm not positive what this was for but It was loading for a while so I screwed up even further by closing the window - XP promptly crashed and I've been troubleshooting ever since.

Now I think i've figured out the problem, I think for some reason the security databases across all user accounts have gone. Yup, gone. None of the accounts, even the administrator accounts has ANY security settings. Hardly any of the services are running most refuse to start with "access denied" thus I cant run system restore because the service isn't running.

To fix this I'm thinking I can import a security template into one of the admin accounts - only thing is the windows "search for files and folders" applet wont run.. because the service is down.

Can some one tell me where I can find the default security templates on my HDD?

Anyone got any other ideas? (reinstall isn't a useful suggestion).

[MrCoffee]

ok, no worries, I think my plan worked.

Took .sdb file from my laptop and used that for one of the admin accounts, applied the settings with the mmc snapin security configuration an analysis, fired up the services, loaded a restore point.