HackingUniversity - Hacks . Tricks . How-To's

02 March 2013

Windows Task Manager Has Been Disabled, How to Fix It ?

Many times working online you come across a stage when your computer gets infected with some kind of virus or malware, well that might nor affect anything but your task manager and disable it up, so what you are going to do at that time. Well I have found some easy solutions to get your task manager back working again.

So now normally to open a Task Manager, you normally do one of the following things :

  • Press Ctrl + Alt + Del on the keyboard
  • Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc on the keyboard
  • Right-click on a blank area on the start bar and choose Task Manager
  • Click on Start, Run and type TASKMGR in the run box and press Enter

task manager disabled

Sometimes instead of Task Manager opening you'll see the following screen. In these cases, you'll have to follow the methods below to re-enable access to the Task Manager. First we'll begin with the various registry modification methods for correcting this problem.


Method 1 - Using the Group Policy Editor in Windows XP Professional

  1. Click Start –> Run, type gpedit.msc and click OK.
  2. Under User Configuration, Click on the plus (+) next to Administrative Templates.
  3. Click on the plus (+) next to System, then click on Ctrl+Alt+Delete Options
    Find Remove Task Manager in the right-hand pane and double click on it
    Choose the option "Not Configured" and click Ok.
  4. Close the Group Policy Window

Method 2: Change the Task Manager Option through the Run line

  1. Click on Start –> Run and type the below command exactly & press Enter.

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableTaskMgr /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

Method 3: Change Task Manager through a Registry REG file

  1. Click on Start –> Run, and type Notepad and press Enter.
  2. Copy and paste the information between the dotted lines into Notepad and save it to your desktop as taskmanager.reg

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
    "DisableTaskMgr"=dword:00000000

  3. Double click on the taskmanager.reg file to enter the information into your Windows registry files.

Method 4: Delete the restriction in the registry manually

  1. Click on Start –> Run, and type regedit and press Enter.
  2. Navigate to the following branch HKEY_CURRENT_USER –> Software –> Microsoft –> Windows –> CurrentVersion –> Policie –> System.
  3. In the right pane, find and delete the value named DisableTaskMgr
  4. Close the registry editor

Method 5: Download and Run FixTaskManager program

  1. Download TaskManagerFix.exe File.
  2. Extract the file from the .zip archive.
  3. Double-click on the file FixTaskManager on your desktop and run it.
  4. That's it it will automatically add registry tweaks and activate you task manager.