Task Manager disabled by Administrator? Fix it

July 17th, 2009

A lot of times, when a computer has been attacked by malware, the malware creators like to disable the task manager, to make the repair hard and tedious.

taskmanagerdisabled

Below you will find the many ways to re-enable Task Manager:

These are the ways the task manager is opened

• Press CTRL-ALT-DEL on the keyboard
• Press CTRL-SHIFT-ESC on the keyboard
• Right-click on a blank area on the start bar and choose Task Manager
• Click on Start, Run and type TASKMGR in the run box and press Enter

First we’ll begin with the various registry modification methods for
correcting this problem.

Method 1 – Using the Group Policy Editor in Windows XP Professional

1. Click Start, Run, type gpedit.msc and click OK.
2. Under User Configuration, Click on the plus (+) next to
Administrative Templates
3. Click on the plus (+) next tSystem, then click on Ctrl+Alt+Delete Options
4. Find Remove Task Manager in the right-hand pane and double click on it
5. Choose the option “Not Configured” and click Ok.
6. Close the Group Policy Window

Method 2: Change the Task Manager Option through the Run line

1. Click on Start, Run and type the following command exactly and press Enter

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
/v DisableTaskMgr /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

Method 3: Change Task Manager through a Registry REG file

1. Click on Start, Run, and type Notepad and press Enter
2. Copy and paste the information between the dotted lines into
Notepad and save it to your desktop as taskmanager.reg
————————————
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
“DisableTaskMgr”=dword:00000000
————————————-

3. Double click on the taskmanager.reg file to enter the
information into the Windows registry

Method 4: Delete the restriction in the registry manually

1. Click on Start, Run, and type REGEDIT and press Enter
2. Navigate to the following branch

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \
Policies\ System

3. In the right pane, find and delete the value named DisableTaskMgr
4. Close the registry editor

Method 5: Download and Run FixTaskManager program

1. Click on the following links and download the program
FixTaskManager to your Desktop

Main Site

Backup Location

2. Double-click on the file FixTaskManager on your desktop and run it