Problems with permissions

I have recently started having some problems with various program permissions.

The biggest problem right now is when I right-click on files and select "Open file location" or "Open containing folder ", absolutely nothing happens. This happens both in Firefox and uTorrent at the moment.

Another problem is when I restart my computer and it's loading the various components, etc., some of them will fail to initialise with a warning message that I do not have appropriate permission to access the file or whatever. These are usually random things, I don't even know what half of them are or do.

And then another thing, is when I try to open Add/Remove Windows Components, nothing happens, it just continues to open Add/Remove Programs which works fine.

I have tried various suggestions from various sites, and nothing seems to work.

I have narrowed it down to a problem with user permissions, because when I created another administrative user and tried to open all the above programs and things, everything worked fine, no issues.

I am currently running Windows XP Home Edition. And also, my computer skills are quite basic. I would like to reinstall Windows, but I have no clue how I should go about doing this or if it's even necessary. My laptop didn't come with any install disks, everything was installed on it already. The only thing I have are two recovery disks that I made when I first got the laptop.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions

 

Thank you for your prompt response.

I uninstalled uTorrent, as suggested, first. But no change occurred. Then I made a new profile and copied all the data from the old profile into it. Some problems with that, but got everything to work in the end.

So now, everything that wasn't working before seems to be alright now. All the "Open containing folder" options etc, seem to be working. The only problem I have now is that when I try to open add/remove windows components, I get an error message "Setup was unable to open information file ieaccess.inf. The specific error code is 0x2 at line 0 ".

I found another thread on here from someone who had the same problem and I followed a suggestion by someone to download and replace the existing ieaccess.inf file. But this had no effect on the problem.

I am definitely going to try out the virus and malware forum like you suggested, as an extra precaution.

 

Ok, I take back what I said. Everything is not ok.

After posting the previous reply, I went ahead and deleted my old profile as instructed after copying all the user data from it to the new profile.

Then I rebooted the computer and realised that all my documents were gone.

I am now trying Recuva to see if I can recover them.

Will post again when I have the results.