How To Enable Windows Task Manager When Disabled By a Virus

Friday, November 25, 2011

Let’s face it. All of us have been infected by virus before. Even if you have anti-virus installed, you can still be infected by a new or custom virus that is not recognized by your anti-virus. Sometimes after removing the virus completely from our system, you’ll face new problems such as you can no longer bring up Windows Task Manager from CTRL+ALT+DEL. You get the error message saying “Task Manager has been disabled by your administrator”. This post will help you to re-enable the Windows Task Manager as long as it cannot open normally. Just follow these steps.

Disabling Task Manager is one way viruses try to make it harder for you to deal with their infections. Before proceeding any further, you should run a complete and up-to-date anti-virus scan of your machine. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that you’ve been infected.Once you come back virus-free, you can proceed with the fix. Usually when you try to run taskmgr.exe manually, you get this message:

If you have Windows XP, Click Start, then click Run and type in gpedit.msc and press OK.

Once in the Group Policy Editor, expand in turn:

User Configuration
Administrative Templates
System
Ctrl+Alt+Del Options

You should see something much like this:

Double click on Remove Task Manager to change its setting:

Click on Not Configured and then OK and Task Manager is available once again.

Using Software Method

If you don’t want to apply these settings yourself, here is a software utility that will let you do these settings. Remove Restrictions Tool (RRT) allows you to re-enables all what the virus had previously disabled, and gives you back the control over your own computer, it even lets you re-enable the Task Manager, Registry Editor, folder options and Show hidden files and folders.