XP user folder not showing to other users

[Peter]

Hi, not long upgraded to XP from ME.(Thank God)
Now we have 5 users on this home computer & all have
administrater access. (No great secrets) 4 of the users
can access each others user folder in 'my computer'.
Why can't we access this '5th' user?
When we do try & open this folder a warning pops up

'C:\.......... Is not accessible
Access is denied'

Any ideas??

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

See Help and Support and search for "take ownership"

HOW TO: Take Ownership of a File or Folder in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=308421

 

[Roger Abell]

This is due to NTFS permissions.

Do not take ownership to resolve this.

Profiles need to have a grant to the account whose
profile it is, and taking ownership usually will interfere
with this (in your case, while all are admins things may
still be mostly OK).

The account where you cannot access from the other
accounts has had its profile made private. All of the
accounts have the option to make their profiles private.

One common way to share things is to have a folder
outside of the profiles where all can access, including
write into. With profiles it is hazardous to allow any
account other than the one whose profile it is have the
ability to write into that profile.

If you want to allow the other accounts read/execute
access to the profile that now disallows access,
log in as the account whose profile it is
start run cmd to get a cmd prompt windows
if the profile is at
c:\documents and setting\stubborn user
then in the cmd window enter
cacls "c:\documents and setting\stubborn user" /t /e /g users:r

This will grant all accounts the ability to read and execute
what is within the other profile - anywhere
Use of
cacls "c:\documents and setting\stubborn user\My Documents" /t /e /g users:r
is more likely what you should use, as this will limit the other
accounts to only that subfolder within the profile

 

[Roger Abell]

See Help and Support and search for "take ownership"

HOW TO: Take Ownership of a File or Folder in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=308421


Sorry Doug, but I have to differ on this one, due
to way that accounts in some cases require that
they be Owner and have a full control grant to
their own profile.
In this case, taking ownership will end up with
Administrators owning and with the only NTFS
grant of full control (assuming they allow the process
of taking ownership to reset NTFS settings), in this
case it is probably a wash - but only while all of
the accounts are admins as at present.
Taking ownership of a profile that is not profile of
and admin is not to be done OTOH.

In this case, simply altering the NTFS permissions
to reverse the "make private" is the route to take.