This is normal, pay attention cause I'm only gonna hit cha one time and ya are gonna love it!! There are two reasons for this error.
Reason 1
There is a registry key in your registry named
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SECURITY\Policy\Secrets"
that hold service account password hash information for the following accounts
NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE
NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE
.\Aspnet (if you've got the Microsoft .NET Framework installed and the ASP.NET Service running under the Aspnet account).
Since this key is restricted to administrators only
even power users will get an error message
Reason 2
Everytime you open the services.msc snap-in as an administrator NT decides "Hey I gotta write something down in case he changes something"
user are prevented from saving change to this key below.
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM"
this key is read-only to them so the SCM say "to hell with this" and quits beccause that user's permissions are restricted.
So this error is normal AFTER YOU'VE PLAYED WITH THE SCM YOURSELF FOR A MINUTE (NT does learn about it's users).
Note: This all depends on registry and file permissions (e.g. Power Users, Backup Operators, and even Administrators may receive this error from time to time although it shouldn't happen to an administrator at all but it is possible).
Note #2: Some services (notibly 3rd party ones will protect themselves if they where written this way to reset their own permission on themselves as to prevent tampering by restricted accounts in NT/XP,
if you have a program like this installed restricted users might be prevented from even opening the services.msc snap-in at all).
> I have just rebuilt (fdisk) a staff members pc (running
> Windows XP Pro) so that I may start with a fresh system
[quoted text clipped - 12 lines]
> Can someone please instruct me on how I may rectify this
> problem.