Well, first of all, I set the Administrator (username) profile on servers without the capabilities that most would expect. This is a security measure being used by many Fortune 500 companies.
So, what this means is, although you are logged into the computer as the Administrator, you really don't have the attributes.
What I would do is look at Documents and Settings, to get a list of all the users that have logged into the machine. Second, I would try and log in locally as an Administrator, rather than the Domain. If you can login locally as the Administrator, you may be able to fix your problems. Once logged into the machine as a local Administrator, setup a user with Administrator rights and keep that password written down somewhere safe. Like inside a safe.
Now, as far as Control Panel Add/Remove programs problems, when you go to uninstall an application, some of this crap that comes from the Internet MUST be connected to the Internet in order to uninstall. This is because Registry is looking for a string that lives on the Internet, at a URL, and only that string will trigger the uninstall to work and delete files on the machine.
Another trick, is to change the settings of the My Computer Properties to WORKGROUP. If you can successfully move from a Domain to the WORKGROUP then your login will stop getting those Network errors that you are seeing.
If you know anything about systems in a large configuration, the WORKGROUP was (in NT4.0 days) a stand-alone computer.
Hope this helps and good luck with hacking the XP laptop.
