I have a problem with my PC. I wanted to ask if any member here is good with this sort of stuff with PCs?

If there is, please say so and I'll outline my problem.

Maybe you should ask your question anyway, and if someone knows, you'll get the answer. Maybe the same thing happened to someone before, so they know what they did and how they fixed it, even though they might not be experts.

Good thread, I'm gonna wait a little, and then I'm gonna change the name into PC Questions, or something like that. Cause we can talk about it in general. For instance, I'm thinking of buying a new one, and I could use some advice.

Well, my problem I've had for some four weeks now. I got the error message:

Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.

Basically I lost administrator access on my PC and have o idea why. This has happened five times in the last four weeks, each time the only way I could resolve it was to reinstall XP Pro SP3 again. Three times I did a complete reinstall, wiping the hard drive of all previous information.

If your main user is loosing privileges, there must be an administrator user. Checkout c:\documents and settings and see if there is an administrator folder in there. If so, try to log into Windows as that user then add your user to the admin user group. Odd that it just loses it like that... Try that and post back, I might be able to give you additional advice.

I don't have any Administrator user, just "All Users" and "My Computer Name" folders in Documents and Settings.

This issue did start about five weeks ago now after the power went out in our area for a split second. The PC turned off. Maybe that could have been it, but the power has gone off before and no such problem ever happened.