Windows 7 "The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation" - Win7

[ChrisDeKitchen]

Hey I recently bought Windows 7 Home Premium and I've been getting the following error from time to time when I try to install programs on my computer.

"The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation"

I only have one user on this computer and that user has administrator rights. The UAC settings slider is at the bottom value...reads something like "never inform me if a program tries to install or make changes to the computer...yadayadayada."

I've read about people getting this error for Windows Vista but haven't seen anybody getting this in Windows 7 so far.

Right now this is stopping me from playing some games and updating drivers as I get this error whenever I try to run a game through Steam that might need updating and so on. I should mention that this is a relatively new install of windows 7, like a month old tops. So chances of this being a virus or something seem slim.

I was looking around in the administrator tools but to me that is just a maze.

Any straightforward and easy way of solving this? I really really don't feel like formating my HDD again or somesuch.

 

[Mitchell_A]

Did you perform a clean install of Windows 7 or did you upgrade from Vista?

 

[Saltgrass]

I found several sites when I pasted your error message in Google.

The only time I have see this message was when I had a virus and could not open task manager or msconfig.exe.

Are you an adminstrative user? Click on your picture in the start menu to see what it says.

 

[Mitchell_A]

Do you have norton installed?

 

[ChrisDeKitchen]

Yup, it was a clean install of Win 7, no upgrade.

Yeah I also found some of those posts about this problem however all I've found were for Windows XP or Windows Vista and the sollution doesn't seem to apply for Win 7.

I have AVG anti-virus installed atm. I'll try disabling it and see if that helps but I doubt it.

I have administrative rights as it's the only profile/account basically.

//EDIT

I just had a look at my file structure in windows. I'm using a couple of different harddrives, one for system, one for storage/backup and a few more for other stuff. The strange thing is that there are several new folders that I have never seen before. They are called "$Recycle.Bin", "$AVG", "Recovery", "System Volume Information" and they are locked for some reason. The "Documents and Settings" folder is also locked, there is also a second "Program" folder that is locked.

All these folders seem to be present on all my harddrives. This is starting to look like some kind of virus or hi-jack attempt.

 

[ChrisDeKitchen]

Hmm, yeah...I do have an old system on another drive installed. I've just never seen those folders before I guess. It is however showing up on several different partitions without any OS installed on them. My storage drive shouldn't have anything other than some backups of files and stuff that I put there but the $AVG and $Recycle.Bin folders appear there as well. Maybe that's just how it's supposed to be?

I just ran Malwarebytes Anti-Malware program and it found "Hijack.DisplayProperties" registry data. I don't know what it is yet or if it could have anything to do with this...gonna see if I can remove it.

 

[ChrisDeKitchen]

Yeah just haven't got around to it really as I need to sort out what needs saving on that drive before I format it.

It looks like the Hijack.DisplayProperties thing might be a false positive, still, strange name for a windows registry key...

 

[ChrisDeKitchen]

Hey Drew, thanks for the reply. In response to those suggestions, I think I saw them in some other post as well.

A) I am logged in as the administrator.

B) I have set the UAC to "never inform me" which I guess is the same as disabling it right?

C) I can't find the "Local Security Settings" menu, I'm using a Swedish version of Win7 however so I might be translating it wrong... All I can find through the administrative tools that could have anything to do with security is the Windows Firewall, and that has some policies that I could change...

I can't find the "HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer" folder in regedit.

I'm ignoring that regkey malware found, I'm not sure it's something to be concerned about from reading on a few forums.

Hid all annoying folders that popped up. AVG had taken some liberties in creating its own folders on all connected drives. Aparently a lot of people are having problems with that since it is some kind of cache that is always in use and can cause your removable drives to become corrupted since it will not allow you to "safely remove hardware." wtg...

The administrator problem persists however...