If that machine has corporate crapware on it, it could have other crapware. Format and reinstall is likely the simplest and safest.

If you want the AI from the last time round industry was trying to sell it, install office and do a custom install. Somewhere in the list of features is crappy clippy.

If you have to keep XP as is, many AV vendors provide rescue CDs. Scan that machine with as many as you can find!

Otherwise, I'd look at gpedit.msc. Get it off any domain it thinks it is on. It's a long time since I've dealt with corp-o-windows, but the behaviour sounds like some policy being enforced.

Could be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Write_Filter or similar.

You should wipe the machine anyway since you don't have control of it and legally you don't have the license its using since its likely not using the license that came with the machine. Old versions of office don't use activation so you shouldn't have any issues reinstalling it.

Thanks for the replies, gents

Corpo-crap it is... I found a program on it called Deep Freeze by Faronics which is meant to do exactly what it is doing... reverting the machine to a fixed image every time it starts up.

I looked up how to get rid of it and tried some of the methods othgers had posted but none were successful. Basically, they all went like this:
go into BIOS and set the year +/- 10 years from what it is to shut down the software (don't understand why that would but...)

ctrl-alt-del to go into Task Mgr/services and look for DF5serv.exe and disable it (and / or the other progran DEEPFREEZE.exe or somesuch

go into the folder c:/program files/faronics and run the uninstaller

one guide even went so far as to include editing the registry and deleting two entries:
HKey Local Machine/System/Controlset1/services/DeepFreeze
and
HKey Local Machine/System/Controlset1/services//DF5Srv

and delete both of them, though it turns out the same files are duplicated in
HKey Local Machine/System/Controlset3
and
HKey Local Machine/System/Controlset current

Now obviously I did all that, and I'm still asking questions, so obviously it didn't work

So I went Nuclear...

I tool the drive out of that machine and put it into another, set as NOT the boot drive, and then went into d:/program files/Faronics and deleted the whole damn folder

Now here's the fun part...

THAT DIDNT WORK!

the program is now gone no matter which computer the drive is in, and when I put it back into the Optiplex, the Deep Freeze icon is not showing up in the system tray and its not showing up in Task Manager / services either

but when I restart the machine, everything still reverts to the original state... the registry has the entries back in it, though the program files are still gone and its not coming back into task manager.

So how the hell does a program that's been deleted... doesn't show up in the tray... and isn't in Task Manager, STILL manage to rebuild itself in Registry and still reset everything whenever I power up the machine???

I'm sure its something simple that's way over my head , but I need a hand here, or mayby a slap in the back of the head!

Thanks Guys!

Do you have any reservations to just nuking the drive? I'd DBAN it overnight and reinstall a fresh copy of XP SP3 and use Snappy to reinstall the drivers. You could even install unofficial SP4 which I personally advocate using, though on a Pentium D, the extra load may a bit be noticeable. I have a 2.0 GHz Core2Duo that handles SP4 like a champ.

If you're concerned about preservation, you could clone/dd the disk to a larger disk for archive/analysis.

Yeah it came with XP originally and all the drivers, bios, etc are still at Dell: https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/produ … lex-745/drivers
Best is to wipe it clean and start over.
added: Hmm ...that Goodwill effed up ! They were supposed to wipe the HD (that is corporate rules, know someone who works for them, but have also got some GW pc's non-wiped ;p )

Horun wrote on 2023-12-12, 04:24:

added: Hmm ...that Goodwill effed up ! They were supposed to wipe the HD (that is corporate rules, know someone who works for them, but have also got some GW pc's non-wiped ;p )

If I were to go a little too far, I'd suggest the machine is nightmare-mode. So even if blanked the moment you look away, XP will respawn 😀

Why you would want to preserve it anyway.
If you remove the fact that it keeps resetting back to the original image then you arent preserving the way it was, and it youre not doing that, just preserving the machine you want it to be then you might just as well put an XP disc in the drive wipe the partition and start again.
Its not like youre wiping anything of interest, its just a school computer with Windows XP and Office 2000 on it.

SO... to close this out, I wound up renstalling XP (sp3) with a Dell OEM disk. "nightmare mode" summed it up pretty well.

It would have been nice to save the Office 2k installation, as I havent used it in may years and it was a little nostalgic for me to see clippy and the little dog and stuff. Probably not 'anything of interest' to you guys, but hey, to each his own.

Thanks for all your help, everyone!

Glad you fixed it. Yeah I understand the desire to try the old office suite. If you search archive org you might find it :0 (seems MS is not interested in removal of it).

Biscuit Shaped wrote on 2023-12-14, 01:41:

SO... to close this out, I wound up renstalling XP (sp3) with a Dell OEM disk. "nightmare mode" summed it up pretty well.

It would have been nice to save the Office 2k installation, as I havent used it in may years and it was a little nostalgic for me to see clippy and the little dog and stuff. Probably not 'anything of interest' to you guys, but hey, to each his own.

Thanks for all your help, everyone!

I still have Office 2000 on my Windows 2000 system.
Its not that it wasnt anything special so much as that it wasnt so special to warrant all the trouble it would take to dig out the software stopping you from using it as you wanted to.
There was nothing on there that couldnt be replaced with software from archive.org.