Cannot open Theme Settings, Display Settings, Screen Saver Settings, etc

[Janya]

I am using Windows Vista Ultimate on Dell XPS laptop. Since start it was with just 1 account that is Admin. And there was not a single problem. Today for some reason I needed to make one more Admin account. So now I am having just 2 accounts and both are with Admin privileges.

Here is the problem, when I logged in the second Admin account for the first time I found that it is with classic theme like we had in windows 2000. In order to change it I tried clicking Personalize by right clicking on desktop, when surprisingly I found that all options are unclickable. I mean nothing happens when I click on Theme, Display or Screen Saver options. The only option that am able to click is Desktop Background, Sounds and Mouse Pointers.

I thought there would have been some problem while creating this new account, hence I went back to First Admin user account to recreate a new one but again surprising thing I found that even my this account is now with classic menu and I cannot change it anyhow. I thought could be virus problem and scanned my complete system with norton antivirus but nothing detected affected.

I don’t have any idea what else can I do. Somebody please help me out. Thank you.

[elander]

Me too facing the same problem with Toshiba laptop since past two months, tried everything but got nothing that helped me to fix the same. Hence using it in that way itself since then. But as I found a buddy, I thought if someone can help us, it will be great. Mine is also Windows Vista 32bit os, I even tried fixing it from Control panel by clicking on Themes option but nothing worked.

While doing some r&d twice somewhere I got an error saying “can't find explorer.exe” or something. Did you too found this error ? I guess the problem is somehow related to this itself. Any ideas ?

[shivinder]

Once I experience similar problem where all my control panel applets were dead. I was not getting any error but nothing was working, even windows update stopped working. Meanwhile I tried searching for some tip on web and came to know that running system file checker can fix the problem. I tried the same, went to command prompt and ran SFC /scannow and everything started working. So you guys should try out the same as well.