I had a short reprieve last evening and I hoped to spend it knitting. Alas, it was not to be. Yesterday afternoon, my phone rang:

#1 Son: Mom, my computer is broken.

Mom: Define “broken.”

#1 Son: When I try to start it up I get a weird error message and when I press [OK] it reboots and the same thing happens over and over.

Mom: What does the error message say? Exactly.

#1 Son: Something about ‘lsass.exe access denied’ and then a message about something trying to access something it didn’t have rights to.

Mom: What were you doing?

#1 Son: Nothing! When I woke up this morning it wouldn’t boot.

Mom: I don’t think this is an over-the-phone thing. I’ll look at it when I get home.

#1 Son: OK. I’m going to use your computer then because I have to get this finished.

Mom: Download anything and you will die!

#1 Son: No problemo.

So, guess what I did last evening? Of course #1 Son was gone when I arrived home. I turned it on his computer and booted it up.

lsass.exe access denied

Which is Win XP’s rather cryptic way of saying, I don’t know who you are and I’m not even sure who I am and that being the case I don’t know if it’s OK for you to log in, so I’m not going to let you. And you can’t make me. So there. Nyah, nyah, nyah

It wouldn’t boot in safe mode. [lsass.exe access denied] It wouldn’t boot to a command line. [nyah nyah nyah nyah] I could get to the repair console, but not really do anything from there that would help. I could reinstall XP, but I tend to think of that as a last-resort solution.

In the end, I pulled out the hard drive and slaved it to my (nice, well-behaved, well-protected, working) computer, manually restored a few strategic config files from a prior restore point, put everything back together and blah, blah, blah (I’m sure all 10 of my readers are fascinated by this).

Welcome back to your desktop. Have a nice day.

I ran a virus scan on both computers, just in case. Nothing was found. The cause of the “breakage” will remain a mystery.

Yes, I realize our family is a little backwards. Most people would expect that it would be me calling my techie son to help fix my computer because it’s doing something weird. Nope. We’re the opposite. I built both of these computers, set up our home network, etc. I love to push buttons and tweak things and figure out how stuff works. For me, technology is a toy. For #1 Son, technology is a tool. He just wants it to work consistently and on demand, without regard to why or how.

I want it to work too. But I can’t say that I didn’t get a little bit of technoid geeky satisfaction from the little interlude.

It seriously cut into my knitting time, though.