Although it’s kind of an oxymoron, because you gotta admit one has to be a bit of a newbie to get into this situation… Anyways, I’m usually careful with writing at a “for dummies” level but this is one of the rare exceptions, and that’s what I meant by “not for beginners”. Read at your own risk.

So you find yourself right-clicking on a program to run as an administrator (you’re logged in as a standard user) and find you get prompted by UAC to confirm you want to run the program as an administrator, except the “Yes” is grayed out and so the only option is “No”. Why is this?

1. As it has been since Windows Vista,  the Administrator logon is disabled by default.

2. If your user was an administrator account, and you had the bright idea to change that to a standard user, OR

3. If you wanted to hide a user account with admin privileges by modifying the registry, and

4. There is no other active admin account,

Congratulations! you have locked yourself out of your own computer 🙂

Of course you know what I mean. You CAN log in as a standard user. But as far as been able to perform administrative tasks, elevated, you’re locked out. The reason why you see the “Yes” option grayed out is because there is no active visible admin account present in the computer. So know what do you do?

There are several ways to work around the problem, in different levels of “drasticallity”. C’mon that’s gotta be a word! The most drastic being of course to re-install the operating system from scratch. The lightest and probably most effective one is to use a Linux based boot CD with the right capabilities, which will allow you to activate the disabled administrator account, and the log in as the administrator and from there change your own user account back to being a member of the administrator’s group. That’s the best way out of the catch-22. An example of such tool is CHNTPW. Google it.