I was troubleshooting some problems with one of our laptops when I ran across a particularly disconcerting source: access to some registry entries by the administrator was no longer allowed. How this happened I can't even begin to imagine, but it doesn't appear to be an entirely uncommon occurrence. I found a nice, quick write-up on how to reset the permissions on the entire registry. A bit of a sledgehammer approach, but I think in this instance it was probably necessary.
So far things seem to be functioning normally again. Hopefully this will address the problems I've been seeing.
