I have been caught out by this and now cannot access my PC.

I have as suggested elsewhere booted from the original Windows XP 2 disk and have tried to effect a repair via the Repair Console. Unfortunately I don't now remember my Administrator password as it's years since I used it and I can't get past this point.

Can anyone from the Clamwin team or any posters on here help - been locked out for 48 hours now and need the PC for home business

Try getting in with Administrator leaving the password blank.

If you're lucky...

Peter B.

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False positives on this file are no longer being reported. It appears the issue has been corrected.

Couple of notes to those of you who've had all your userinit.exe files quarantine or removed including Windows File Protection backups.

1. If you happened to boot into the SP2 disk and replaced using userinit.exe from the SP2 version, you will still need to update to the patched SP3 version of the file. If you do not have a SP3 install disk, extract the contents of the SP3 service pack update as outlined previously in this post and expand a copy of that file in the i386 directory (userinit.ex_) to your system32 directory.

2. If you are unable to login to windows because you are missing userinit.exe and cannot access recovery mode on your computer because of a lost Administrator password you have a couple of options:

a. reinstall windows
b. use a windows password changing tool from a disk utility like the "Offline NT Password and Registry Editor" to reset your master Administrator account password as is available on the Ultimate Boot CD here:

https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

boot into the utility disk to use the tool to change the password and then boot into the windows recovery console and follow instructions for expanding userinit.exe file back to the system32 directory

Thanks,
Tim

thanks for all your help on getting back to the point of rebooting the PC after Clamwin had quarintined the login files

I found a program to blank the Windows Administrator password and got past that point in Windows Recovery Console.
Followed instructions you gave from their ie changed to i386 and gave the expand instruction but then got the message " access denied"

can you get me over what is hopefully this last hurdle ie why am I being denied access and what can I do about it.

My bbot disk is the original Windows xp one I got with the PC a few years ago ie sp2 - I had upgraded to sp 3 at some later point if this is relevant.

Very grateful for help so far - is it possible to finally crack this and get in - I am slowly dying with total frustration.
David

David, I don't know if this will help, but give it a shot: If you have access to the F12 key when trying to boot, hit that and see if you can bypass the denied access that way. When I hit F12, I have the option to boot from a CD and some more options. Maybe at this point, you could acccess the hard drive or access a Windows CD and get in that way. You can also access your normal bootup configuration (don't mess with it unless you really know what you are doing).

Regards,

@GuitarBob

Thanks for that.

The point at which I am being denied access is only when I try to expand userinit.ex_ into system32 with Windows XP Professional sp2 in the drive as the boot into Recovery Console route as suggested by tpleiman in the post above yours - does your suggestion still apply in that situation ?

No, I don't think it would apply then--only during a regular/non-assisted bootup.

Regards,

Have solved my immediate problem ie back into PC now and operating ok - it seems.

Will post short resume later as it may help raw beginners like me - thanks for all contributions without which I would not have solved this - in particular tpleiman.