On my main pc (Win 7 64bit) basic windows commands like ping and ipconfig suddenly need admin rights.

If I start a normal command-line window, these commands are not found anymore ("X is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.")

If I start the command-line window with "Run as Administrator" everything works as expected.

On my second PC (Win 7 32 bit) I do not need admin rights. And I strongly believe that I did not need admin rights on my main pc a couple of weeks ago. Something must have changed, thus I think there must be some (registry) switch or something.

any ideas? thanks a lot

[edit]

I am still the admin user - just starting cmd normally, not with "run as admin"

[edit2]

It indeed was the PATH, variable. Problem was, that Path was saved as the wrong type of string in the registry

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment\Path

has to be a REG_EXPAND_SZ as explained in this thread. Path being of the wrong type of string made it unable to expand %SystemRoot%. Make sure that both your system PATH as well as your user PATH environment variables are of type REG_EXPAND_SZ.