My buddy said he has no control panel. I told him I would try to find some info for him. He has windows 2000 pro. He says its been running fine except today he went to start and was going to go to settings and control panel but control panel doesn't show up. I told him to try to go to my computer and see if control panel was listed on the right side he said it wasn't. He was going to go to control panel to change the time since we had a time change and thats when he noticed it was gone. I told him to right click on the time in the tray area so he could change it that way but when he right click on it the box open and he click on date and time and it told him something to the effect of he didn't have admin rights thats never happened. Can someone give me some info or where to find a fix for control panel missing in windows 2000 ?

I ran over to his place and tried this stuff I read that was suppose to fix the problem but didn't, in fact when you go to start>settings the control panel wasn't there but after trying this stuff now the internet isn't even under setting only the taskbar something or other I need help bad. Here is what I tried

nosetfolders.vbs - Disable/Enable Control Panel and Printer folders on Start Menu/Settings
© Doug Knox - rev 02/06/2000
This code may be freely distributed/modified.
Usage: Download nosetfolders.vbs Save the file to the folder of your choice. Double click the VBS file. The VB Script file will check for the appropriate value and if not found will create it. If the value was found, it will be toggled to its opposite state and you will be informed that you need to log off/back on or restart your computer. Note: This also disables Control Panel in My Computer. This script can be viewed in Notepad or any text editor, as to the specific Registry key and value that are updated. Your antivirus software may report this script as potentially malicious, or a possible virus. This is because the script writes to the System Registry.
http://www.dougknox.com/index.html


Other things to try

Control Panel - Icons Missing
Click Start, Run and enter REGEDIT

Go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\don't load

Look in the right pane and you'll see the Control Panel Icons that have been disabled. You can either right click on the "don't load" subkey and select Delete to restore all disabled icons, or you can right click on each of the items in the right pane and select Delete to selectively restore them. Scroll up to Control Panel Applets for a listing of what each one is.

The change will be seen the next time you open Control Panel.

This has the earmarks of the "Winavx" trojan. It's always difficult to know what to do in these cases -- try to clean up the OS, or just reinstall it fresh.

Jerry