I was able to give admin access to a friend. He said there are no ip's banned or emails but I still get the banned message along with a lot of other users. How else could have banned my account?

Use tools.php and rebuild the caches listed.

Just tried that as recommended.

Still banned. :(

Did your friend log in with your "banned" account?

Nope, I gave his username admin permissions through the tools.php.

I'm really stumped here.

Have you checked to make sure the usergroup or groups that the banned users are in haven't been changed to a banned group.

Edit: But that still doesn't explain why you can create another account....hmmmm

I'm in! "This Usergroup is not a 'Banned' Group" for the " Unregistered/Not logged in usergroup " was set to NO

Because if a user is banned the IP is banned too so if there's a static IP, the message about "You've been banned" will appear even when trying to register again.

For that particular problem - use direct SQL access and change the usergroup of your own account back to "Admin" and the Email address if this was changed.
Then go through the password recovery process to get access again.

And then - reinstall everything that it doesn't happen again

User ban and IP ban are to separate type of banning options.
To ban an IP you have to manually ban an IP under "User Banning Options" > "Ban IP Addresses"

The reason he couldn't create another user was because the " Unregistered/Not logged in usergroup " was set as a banned group, which makes sense now.....;)