One of my friend came rushing to my home yesterday with an issue with his laptop. He told that he wants to remove some program but he is unable to open Control Panel. When I logged in to his laptop as an administrator even I was surprised to see that it is not allowing me to go to Control Panel. First off all it did not have the Control Panel entry in Start menu and nor in the left panel of My Computer. When I tried to go through run command by typing ‘control panel’ it gave me an error message “This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions” where as I was logged in as administrator.

First let me tell you the causes this can happen. The most important reason is the restriction set by administrator, but when you yourself is the administrator this reason is not valid. A virus/spyware infection comes next and may be a corrupt registry entry which may be caused due to virus/spyware infection. I will provide various steps and it is good to try them one by one and check if you get access to Control Panel.

Registering Files:

- Click on Start and Run and type cmd and click on OK.

- In command prompt type the following as it is provided:

REGSVR32 appwiz.cpl
REGSVR32 inetcpl.cpl
REGSVR32 nusrmgr.cpl

If the registration is successful, you will get a message that “Dllregister server in appwiz.cpl succeeded”

Modify Registry:

Note: Take a back up of registry before doing this.

Click on Start and Run.

Type Regedit and click on OK. It will open registry editor.

Navigate to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER /Software /Microsoft /Windows /CurrentVersion /Policies /Explorer

Search for the value ‘NoControlPanel’ from the right panel from the right and set the Value Data to 0(zero) by double clicking on the entry or we can delete that entry too.

Repeat the same steps for

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /Software /Microsoft /Windows /CurrentVersion /Policies /Explorer

Use a patch if you are Novice:

If you do not wish to mess up with the registry and you are not experimental, use Control Panel restriction patch from kelly’s Korner.

If none of the above works, I am sure you have screwed up the PC by watching all sorta porns and downloading all free stuffs from sites full of spywares. Come to our FORUM and post your concerns and we will take care of the issue.

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