Hello everyone. I hope I'm posting this in the right area.

ASUS P5Q
C2D E7200
Radeon 3870 HD
4 GB RAM

Operating system? Why, 64 bit XP, of course. I've been running it since August. It's been amazing. I've been able to install and and use everything from games to apps.

That is until now.

The other day I decided to reinstall my computer. It's something I usually do after the first couple of months out of habit. Everything went fine. I even got my wireless adapter up and running a whole lot quicker than last time (but that's a different story). My computer just isn't the same though... and I have no idea what's going on. Okay, I got my drivers installed and blazed a trail through Windows Update, but I bought a computer to, you know, do stuff.

Windows Activation could not connect to the internet, so I had to activate over the telephone.

Windows Defender cannot update itself. I had to manually download the update. This isn't such a problem at first glance, but they tend to update definitions frequently.

I cannot change icons or link paths on internet shortcuts. On regular shortcuts, I cannot "find target" or change icon.

I cannot install any programs outside of NOD32 and Adobe Reader. I keep getting these wierd "1628: Failed to complete installation" errors. This is probably the biggest of my problems, as it renders my computer practically useless.

If I try an open User Accounts I get an "Internet Explorer Script Error" saying the error is "Access is denied" and listing "res://C:\WINDOWS\system32\nusrmgr.cpl/nusrmgr.hta" as the URL. It then asks me if I want to continue running scripts on this page, to which I click yes, and the UA pops up, but... unformatted. It seems to work though.

These errors happen both on my administrator account and my main computer administrator account.

Any idea what's going on? Everything worked perfectly the other day. Now I'm on my third reinstall. I cannot think of any logical reason for this. I've even run CopyWipe multiple times.

Help?

Did you do a fresh install, or are you updating the existing installation?

I'm currently on my third fresh install.

Can't think why this should happen with a fresh install, but have a look here for a few things to try regarding the 1628 errors.

Just to clarify, with the fresh installs did you reformat the hard disk? If so then I really don't know what to suggest. I've never had any problems installing XP64.

Well I fixed the problem and everything has been running great for several days. All the problems are gone.

How I fixed it doesn't make any sense though.

I had to go into admin tools -> local security policy, set the software restrictions policy, then disable it for the administrator account.

I have no idea why not having a restriction policy would automatically impose one, or why the whole system would go off in the first place, especially since everything ran fine the first install. But, it is fixed, so anyone else who has this problem - there you go.