Are You Locked Out of Your Control Panel?

The control panel is probably the single most important ‘center’ of your Windows operating system. It lets you customize and modify virtually any preference in your computer (much like the Windows registry, only with a GUI that’s easier to navigate with). Thus, malware developers look to exploit this by restricting users access to it so that changes made by the malware cannot be removed or reverted, since the control panel cannot be accessed. Thankfully you might (if the malware is still active, the restriction may not be removed as the malware would keep create the restriction) be able to gain access to your control panel in a few ways.

You could use freeware like ‘Disk Heal’ or you can perform it manually, below I’ve explained how to perform it manually using the windows registry (it is good practice to backup the registry before modifying it as the registry is a critical application of the operating system so any adverse effects maybe reversed)

Open the registry

Go to Start > Run > Type “regedit”

Search for the nocontrolpanel entry

Navigate to Edit>Find or press Ctrl + F, the value will be found if the control panel restriction exists.

Remove the entry

You can do this by right clicking the entry and deleting it or modifying the entry and setting the value to ‘0’.

Repeat the above two steps again

There maybe more than one occurrence of this entry, thus make another search for the same entry and remove the entry if it exists.

For the changes to take effect you might have to restart your computer, after you reboot check if the control panel can be accessed by navigating to Start > Run > “control panel”, if the restriction still exists as mentioned above, the malware is still accessed and you’ll need to use an anti virus program like Kaspersky to remove the malware first.