Well I spent HOURS on the system. While the computer name and setting a password helped, it got a lot of things working, IE, defender and other programs there was still multiple things that wouldnt work.
If you tried to go to the dependencies tab on any service you got win32 access denied. Try to pull up any system information, access denied. Try to use WMI access denied. While most things work I found that the things that where not working are the comes that uses the com+ applications store.
So when i go check it there is a permissions denied error to even look at them, you get the red arrow problem. And when you Google it TONS of people get this problem.
I did every trick in the book to repair and get com+ working. Nothing worked what so ever. All permissions where set properly and everything should be working. I even did the steps to rebuild the com+ store and that didnt make any difference. So either the com+ store was simply to corrupt and unrecoverable or the permissions tokens that the special system accounts that windows uses got messed up.
Since it was Windows 8 and not pro it had no way to edit and look at any policies that where set. So thankfully I know a trick to move gpedit over so i can work on it. I checked and the permissions had a missing account and some things where different. But otherwise nothing I could see was out of order.
I found some people with the same problem where able to get things working by adding the system account and service accounts to the admin group, which I tried and it didn't help but that did tell me that it is possible for the access permissions on the system accounts to get messed up.
I had to stop after spending so much time on it because I had to get 4 computers built for a customer I am taking to today. So we may just do a factory reset and then get him back up and then updated to 8.1. I did come up with some new things to add to the repair program during that and I hate not finding the answer.
Who knows I may continue on it before I have him do the factory reset. I really want to find out what happened. But by the amount of people I found that this has happened to I am surprised none of the fixes I found work. Of course all the fixes where for xp, 2003 or 7. None directly to 8 so maybe 8 has something different. But I know if I could fix the com+ that everything else that depends on it would start working as well.
Shane
