I had horrible feeling that this was the case. The symptoms you are getting are the same as I have had with hive file corruption but I am unsure what the effect of having an oem build is.
Microsoft seem to be worried you could find yourself without working admin passwords.
I suspect that despite microsofts warnings that you could get away without replacing security.sam.
I would however say that before going down this route you need to make sure you have back-ups of everything on the drive. Which could be easier said than done since that may require removeing the drive and hooking it up to another machine.
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ninetydegrees
Re: recovering xp
2008-12-29 17:31 (UTC)Microsoft seem to be worried you could find yourself without working admin passwords.
I suspect that despite microsofts warnings that you could get away without replacing security.sam.
I would however say that before going down this route you need to make sure you have back-ups of everything on the drive. Which could be easier said than done since that may require removeing the drive and hooking it up to another machine.
Richard