Problem With Parental Controls

[Mulsiphix]

Each time Windows starts up a notification balloon appears in the systray regarding Parental Controls. Recently I was helping my mom setup parental controls (I'm in NM, she's in TX) and to walk her through it I set it up on my computer. Now that I've finished helping I have removed parental controls.

By remove I mean I uninstalled the Windows Live tools completely, disabled the service Parental Controls, deleted all standard user accounts, disabled the guest account, and removed the passwords from the two remaining accounts, both of which are administrators. I am unsure why I am still getting notifications about a feature that is not enabled and is, via services, disabled.

Can anybody help? The exact message I am receiving at starts up is;

Windows Parental Controls
One or more administrator accounts
have no password. Administrator
accounts with no password allow
anyone to bypass or turn off
parental controls. Click here to
ensure passwords on these accounts.

 

[NoGoodNamesLeft]

Only thing i can say that might help is to make sure you deleted EVERYTHING. Such as startup items in msconfig and folders/other files related to Windows live. Try searching your hardrive for anything that has to do with Windows live tools.
Hope this helps.

 

[Mulsiphix]

They aren't starting with Windows (I've thoroughly checked the registry). A search for windows live doesn't come up with anything. Given that parent controls is apart of Windows 7, not something merely installed, I'm curious if there are other services that may be tied to the Parental Control service. Grrr =(

 

[Mulsiphix]

Alright my search locations must have been off because I tried again today and I have a list of 21 files that have parental in their name. There were some leftover folders and files within that were located in AppData but those have been removed. The picture below shows the 21 remaining files. I consider myself to be a power user but I honestly can't figure out if any of this is safe to delete (without Windows throwing a fit). Any feedback would be most appreciated. Please Help!

Click To View

(1680x1023)

 

[Petey7]

You wouldn't happen to be able to do a system restore, would you?

 

[Mulsiphix]

You wouldn't happen to be able to do a system restore, would you?

No . That feature is disabled. In the past I've had a couple of really bad experiences with it. I have stuff to restore windows in a crisis but my last "backup" (only keep one a time as it is a HD image) was performed after the parental controls were installed.

 

[Jacee]

Have you looked at this link? How to disable Windows Parental Controls reminder - The Winhelponline Blog

 

[Petey7]

Well, I hope this experience serves as a reason to turn System Restore back on, as it would solve your problem is matter of minutes, and shows why it is good to have multiple back-ups (why did you create an image when you having software related problems?).

I've been looking and looking, and doing some serious thinking, but I can't think of much. The only idea I have at this point is to undo everything you've done since you first got all the parental controls setup and then trying to turn parental controls off. I would consult us on here before uninstalling anything or making any changes in services (for a second time).

I just want to stress the point for you and future readers, if you didn't turn system restore off (along with all other changes you've obviously made) it would have taken 10-20 minute to undo everything you did while walking your mom through the process, and you wouldn't have the problems you are having.

 

[Mulsiphix]

Have you looked at this link? How to disable Windows Parental Controls reminder - The Winhelponline Blog

Actually I had already stumbled across this. The problem with this solution is that it requires Parental Controls to be installed and functional. All it will do at that point in time is suppress the notification. I want to keep the Parental Controls service disabled and any of the Windows Live content off my hard drive. I'm confused about how Parental Controls is continuing to function without Windows Live, a disabled service, and only a handful of, what appear to be, files which appear to be directly apart of Windows.

Well, I hope this experience serves as a reason to turn System Restore back on, as it would solve your problem is matter of minutes, and shows why it is good to have multiple back-ups (why did you create an image when you having software related problems?).

I've kept System Restore off since a year after Windows XP was released. To date I haven't had a single problem that I couldn't handle because the feature was disabled. I've been able to recover from all serious Windows problems using my HD image and backups. Note that in a crisis I've only restored Windows using the image once. I usually am just pulling certain files out of it.

I do want to note that this entire thread is one of curiosity. I mean no disrespect when I say this; I don't consider this little notification in my systray a "lesson to be learned". My HD image backup is automatic and I was unaware of the PC notification issue at the time so there was no reason to disable the backup. Note that on top of the HD image all of my personal files that are important to me are backed up to a 1TB external HD every day.

I just want to stress the point for you and future readers, if you didn't turn system restore off (along with all other changes you've obviously made) it would have taken 10-20 minute to undo everything you did while walking your mom through the process, and you wouldn't have the problems you are having.

Please note that if System Restore was available to me I would not want to simply restore Windows to a previous state. I am genuinely interested in learning why this notification remains active. I have somewhat recently made the jump from Windows XP Pro and I wasn't sure if this issue was something that could easily be fixed or if there was some new knowledge about Windows 7 functionality to be gained in the process of silencing the notification.

 

[marsmimar]

Suggestion: make a complete system image of your computer right now, including those 21 files you found. While you're at it, make the system repair disk. Once you have your system image and repair disk, delete those files and see how your computer works. If anything stops working you can always revert back to your present condition. If everything is still working in a week of so after deleting those 21 files, make another system image with your now clean machine. Just a thought. No disrespect intended.

 

[Mulsiphix]

Suggestion: make a complete system image of your computer right now, including those 21 files you found. While you're at it, make the system repair disk. Once you have your system image and repair disk, delete those files and see how your computer works.

Fantastic idea my friend . I was actually already making the image when I received your reply. So with my security blanket in place I tried searching some of these files on the net and, for the most part, all that was turning up were entries in HijackThis and other malware logs. I decided the best way to go would be to start deleting, one by one, these remaining files and see what happened.

The very first set of files to be deleted were WindowsParentalControls and WindowsParentalControlsMigration, both of which were located in C:\Windows\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\Shell. I rebooted and waited for five minutes (not touching the computer). No notification. I rebooted a second time and waited and still no notification. So now I have a question based on the location of the two files deleted. Were these remaining Task Scheduler entries?