Administrator Can't Carry Out Admin Tasks

My dad has a laptop which runs Win 7 32 bit Starter and today a problem occurred which neither of us have experienced before.We can't access anything that modifies the OS or Hard Drive. Therefore we can't even change user permissions (We can't run anything with the little blue and yellow shield next to it either). The message we get is: " Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item. " There is only one account on the OS and that's the administrator account that my dad has always used.