Options being greyed out is normally associated with Win98 on home systems where someone has set user profiles, but discovered that they can just hit 'esc' on the login in dialogue to bypass the login (possibly because they forgot the password).

As no user profile is loaded, many 'features' (including email settings) don't behave as expected.

Forgotten passwords aren't a problem, because you can start up in MSDOS and delete the .pwl files! Next time you reboot, you ill be prompted for a new password.

Win 2000 and XP are much more secure, but WinME is a bit flaky.