WinXP: You Must Be Logged in as an Administrator When Installing This Program

In a new Windows XP installation, I ran into a situation where my system was running really slowly.  To fix that, I tried to install a program called Advanced Windows Care (AWC) .  That program had been superseded by Advanced SystemCare , but for some reason (price or performance, I dimly recalled, but I wasn't sure which), I had decided not to take the upgrade.  I was trying to install AWC as part of a new Windows XP installation.  When I tried to install it, I got an error message:

You must be logged in as an administrator when installing this program.

But I was!  I went into Start > Run > control userpasswords2 and observed that my username, Ray Woodcock, was a member of the Administrators group, just like the Administrator itself.  But according to Philip's SpeedGuide , writing on another issue, being in the Administrators group was not the same as being an (or should I say The) Administrator.

I didn't have the option of logging in as Administrator.  When I booted up, my startup screen showed only the Ray Woodcock username.  To add the Administrator on that opening page, Astrahost advised a registry edit at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList to add a DWORD named Administrator with a value of 1, followed by a restart.  That worked -- I did have an Administrator account to log into now -- but I still got the same error message.  I checked -- I was definitely logged in as Administrator -- but Advanced Windows Care didn't think so.

I verified that this was not just an AWC issue.  I tried installing another basic utility, known as Bulk Rename Utility, and got the same message:  "You must be logged in as an administrator when installing this program."

I got a clue from Marcin , who said this:

If the [computer] is a member of a domain, then settings applied via Active Directory GPOs will take effect even when [it] is not connected to the network. Is this the case? If so, you would need to make the computer account a member of a workgroup (i.e. remove it from the domain) in order to be able to modify the local password policy.

Pursuing a search along these lines, I heard Dave suggest that I try Control Panel > System > Computer Name > Change > Member of Workgroup.  But that was already how it was set.  While switching between accounts, though, I noticed that the slowness existed only in the Ray Woodcock account, not in the Administrator account.  So I went into the Administrator account, hit Start > Run > control userpasswords2, selected the Ray Woodcock account, and clicked Remove > OK.  The dialog closed.  I went back into it and the Ray Woodcock account was still there.  I did it again.  This time, I got a message saying, "Ray Woodcock will no longer be allowed to use this computer."  Taking that as proof that computers are not yet smart enough to control the world, I clicked Yes.  That didn't solve the problem of not being able to install AWC, but it did solve the problem of having a slow Ray Woodcock account.  I decided to just use the Administrator account for now.  It was still somewhat slow, but at least it was functional.

To install a program that requires the installer to be logged in as Administrator, Richard Harper suggested (for Vista) that you right-click on the program to be installed and click "Run as Administrator."  There was no option in XP, and anyway, I was already running as administrator. Carpetfresh indicated that the problem also arose in Windows 7, and the suggestions offered in that case seemed to have been things that s/he had already tried.  After reviewing some other discussions that did not seem to be drawing much attention or producing clear solutions, I decided to take the advice of Buckdog05 :  it was unsettling to have a new Windows installation be already showing difficult problems, so I decided to start over.

I tried a repair installation (insert the Windows installation CD, proceed toward installation, but then choose repair rather than a fresh installation).  This seemed to make little practical difference, though; the system went through a more or less complete new installation process, complete with the requirement of entering the Product ID during installation and then of activating the installation.  But then I saw that Comodo Fireway and Avast antivirus were still installed, so plainly it was different from a new installation in some ways.  Unfortunately, the repair installation did not fix the "You must be logged in as an administrator" error -- even though there was now only one Administrator account, and that's what I was logged in as.  So I tried again, this time doing a complete reinstallation from scratch (i.e., not a repair installation).

After doing the complete reinstallation, including (this time) a decision to delete the Ray Woodcock account and make sure that everything was being installed in the Administrator account, I tried again to install AWC.  This time it installed with no problems.