Geogebra cannot run without administrator's privilege

Question

I have been using Geogebra for windows in my windows 7 laptops for years. Usually administrator's privilege is not necessary in order to start a geogebra.

However, recently, I found Geogebra would not start unless I run it as administrator; this weird issue occurs first in one of my laptop, then spreads like a virus to another. Currently, the third computer does not have such a issue.

So this does not seem like a problem with Geogebra itself. The common phenomenon I met in the two problematic laptops is: Adobe Acrobat does not work and has been reinstalled, which probably has something to do with the current issue but I am not very sure.

Currently, if I double click geogebra without admin's privilege, the geogebra.exe and javaw.exe processes appear in sequence in task manager windows for 1 or 2 seconds and then disappear. Only when running as admin, the javaw.exe can be normally started.

I tried to uninstall geogebra and clear the registry information, update the java to the latest version, reinstall geogebra with the latest version, ... all these efforts do not solve this issue.

Are there any hints for me to try in order to solve it?

Answer 1

Problem solved.

Because in task manager the javaw.exe is called "Java(TM) Platform SE binary" so I search by Google with this keyword and find the following link:

Java(TM) Platform SE binary has stopped working (Windows 7)

which refers to: registry : Java Glossary

I realized the root cause might be registry information had been illegally changed by maloperation: that would probably be one of the reasons why Acrobat stopped working.

Since I didnot backup the system for disk saving consideration and there were tooooo many details for me to recover in the registry, I decided to delete the current user account and create a completely new one, which finally solved my problem.

The lessons are:

1. backup your system when possible;
2. limit the current user account as standard user (with no administrator's privilege);
3. don't make modification to registry if you're not sure what would happen or at least backup it before you have to do it
4. use google keywords to find clues or answers when encountered problems