No way to get simple permissions back?

Hi. Hope someone can help with this before I stroke out.

On a recent (not heavily tweaked) install of Win 7 Ultimate my notification icons disappeared. Snooping the forums led me to try using the customize button to turn the icons back on, but they're grayed out and Win7 tells me to call my remote administrator (no such person on my home network machine, except me, the local apparently fake administrator).

Attempts to take ownership of the drive failed because only "trustedinstaller" can do that. There's an ugly Catch 22 here and the long MS article at Security: New ACLs Improve Security in Windows Vista just says there are good reasons for it but doesn't say how to solve the problem.

MS does mention that some lusers grouse about the problem. Just because they don't own their own OS and apparently can't get it back. Imagine such ingratitude.

I have turned off UAC (set it to level 4), enabled the built-in administrator and used it to specifically confer my username with rights to change ownerships, given my username and the whole universe full control rights, and in general destroyed my sense of system security. And I STILL can't get my notification icons back or take ownership of my drive, my UI or my system.

Microsoft doesn't offer a remedy. Can anyone here help? I really, really don't want to go back to Vista, though XP is looking pretty good about now. I still have a licensed copy somewhere.

Go to your control Panel >>> Folder Options >> Click on the View TAB >>> scroll all the way to the bottom of the list and uncheck "Use sharing wizard (recommended)"

You might find following interesting:
Start | SECPOL.MSC

Drill down to the User Account policies :
Navigation Pane : Security Settings | Local Policies | Security Settings
Policy Pane: scroll down to User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode

You will find several other interesting options in this area.

open run command and type gpedit.msc and look for windows settings-security settings-local policies-user rights assignment go to the bottom and look at take ownership of files or other objects and add your user account and reboot

Both those policy tools gave me some new things to try but no joy. My userid is now listed in every pertinent place, is a member of the administrators group, and has superuser status wherever I could find a place to anoint my userid. Also, if it weren't for my NAT this box would be wide open to every script kiddie in the L337 universe. And I still can't get permission to make my notification icons visible. The only real change is that now I can't turn the tray clock on or off either.

Oh well. At this point it's so screwed up it isn't worth trying to fix. Time to haul out Clonezilla, wipe the partition and lay down an earlier version that ran the way I want it to. And then slog through adding my utilities. Again.

I used to do that with Windows 95 a lot. It's like an echo from 15 years ago. Funny - I don't feel 15 years younger.

Thanks for trying, and for some good pointers to possible solutions.

A workable solution. You also might want to investigate the Backup capabilities of Windows 7. Microsoft finally got it right and produced a backup program that works.

Control Panel | Backup and Restore | in the left-hand pane, choose "Create a System Image".

I got brave and tried the backup and then used the restore portion thereof to perform a 100% restore.