Actions such as search and drag and drop do not work because the default access permissions have been changed in the Dcomcnfg.exe tool

When using your computer, you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

• Nothing happens when you click the hyperlinks on Web pages that are supposed to open a new window.
• Nothing happens when you right-click a hyperlink on a Web page, and then click Open in a new window.
• You select a hyperlink in Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Outlook Express and it does nothing.
• In a drag-and-drop operation, when you attempt to drop an item to the Start menu or any folder on the system, the mouse cursor changes to a circle with a slash through it and it does not enable you to drop anything.
• In Microsoft Internet Explorer, on the Edit menu, when you click Find (on This Page), it may not work or it may only work once.
• If you point to Search, and then click For Files or Folders, it does not work.
• The Search On the Internet feature does not work.
• When you try to start Microsoft Office Assistant, you may receive the following error message:
  Problem occurred using Office Assistant, Do you want to reinstall it?
• When you try to drag-and-drop a file from Outlook 2000 to a folder, you may receive the following error message:
  Cannot create another system semaphore.
• You cannot print from in Internet Explorer.
• You cannot print HTML messages in Outlook.
• Nothing happens when you click the Windows Update command on the Start menu.
• If you visit the Windows Update Wet site, you can scan your system but when you try to download the file you see the "Preparing to Download" message but the progress indicator does not change

Note that this functionality appears to fail in Windows Explorer and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

This behavior may occur because the Default Access permissions have been changed in the Dcomcnfg.exe tool.

To resolve this behavior, perform the following steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type dcomcnfg, and then click OK.
2. Click the Default Security tab.
3. In the Default Access Permissions box, click Edit Default.
4. Verify that both System and Interactive are listed with Allow Access. If either are missing, add them by clicking Add.
5. In the List Names From box, make sure that the local computer name is listed.
6. Set Type of Access to Allow Access.
7. Click the account that is missing, and then click Add.
8. Repeat Step 7 if both accounts are missing.
9. Click OK, click OK, and then click OK again.

To update your settings, you must log off, and then log on to the computer.

If the list of Access permissions is empty, the system and interactive accounts have implicit access rights. If a user or group is added to this list, the implicit rights no longer apply and only the users explicitly listed can have rights. This is a change in behavior from Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. In Windows NT 4.0, the system and interactive accounts maintained their access rights even though they were not explicitly listed. For additional information about related topics, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: