Help a novice with disabled display properties in XP

I'm running XP and I don't know what I'm doing. I'm trying to change the background graphic but the display properties desktop features are all disabled. As far as I can tell the account I'm using an administrator. Anybody know what I'm missing here?

Could you please provide some more information? How do you know that they are disabled? Do the controls just not show up? Is there an error message? Is your operating system up to date with patches?

You can look in your registry.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ ActiveDesktop

If there is a key called NoChangingWallpaper, it's likely set to 1, which means you can't change your wallpaper. Set it to 0 and you should be able to change it again.

How do you look into the registry? basically how do you get there to view what you have written?

Thanks,
Another Troubled XP User!

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Originally Posted by GYAENT

How do you look into the registry? basically how do you get there to view what you have written?

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You should have started a new thread. Anyway, run regedit.exe or regedt32.exe. You can type this from the run box.