If you/she/another family member has a PC with the space- remove her
drive and copy all of her stuff to that other drive ( even temporarily)
rather than buying a new one . That's what you ( we all ) get for being a
nice guy. ;-

You probably mentioned this before .. she never did a backup ?
Did you try Start - all Prgs - Accesories - System Tools - Backup -
Restore - just to see what dates are there ?

Good Luck

"Ben Myers" wrote in message
...
Having spent many futile hours trying to find the root cause of registry
problems, I think I would spend a few bucks on either an external USB
hard drive
kit or a bare drive with USB cable and power source, copy the 50GB of
priceless
photos, and blow away Windows. Personally, I can only tolerate so much
education due to the ineptness of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and all
their little
galley slaves who do not know how to design operating systems, only how
to sell
them... Ben

On Thu, 10 Apr 2008 05:59:09 -0500, "Kevin Childers"

wrote:

About 50 Gb of family photos, etc. just have to get a storage medium
for
it all. System does not have a burner in it I think, not an option with
that model, I think. The classic Windows solution is always an option,
but
I real would like to know the root cause if only for my own education.

KMC

"Ben Myers" wrote in message
. ..
This smells like one of many screwed up WIndows registries, and, if
the
owner's
data is not a major concern, I think I would blow it all up and start
all
over
with a fresh install of Windows. There is nothing special or kinky
in
the Evo
500 hardware that would cause this... Ben Myers

On Mon, 7 Apr 2008 12:42:15 -0500, "Kevin Childers"

wrote:

Having an odd issue on a Compaq EVO 500 SFF

System seems to think it is part of a network with some form of
user/group
policy restrictions applied.

Running Windows XP Home
Owner is not a tinkerer and has no idea how any restrictions could
have
been
applied to her PC.
Owner only noticed something was odd when the clock didn't update to
DST.
No longer has access to control panel and several other of the usual
restrictions one might find on a company PC.
While the machine was once part of a corporate network it was
purchased
sans
HD and had a new 80 GB HD installed with a fresh install of Windows XP
(updated to SP2).
When I first tried to check, could not log-in to the Admin account.
Used Log-in recovery and passwords for Admin and User account came
back
both
as "blank"
Logging in as Admin doesn't have any more access rights than the user
account.
Tried to locate "GPEdit" to see what was up, but was not found on the
system.
Not sure what the owner could have done to precede this.
Also noted that access to the Windows Update site is disallowed.
Software includes: Adware, Spybot and Norton Internet Security
Suggestions???