User accounts in explorer

[Jr]

Single user of computer and am the administrator, upgraded from XP to Home
premium. In explorer in the Users folder with my account name why do some
of the sub-folders such as Application Data, Local Settings, My Documents,
NetHood, Send to, Start Menu have little blue shortcut arrows on the icons.
I cannot open them getting the message:
C:\Users\my name\Local Settings is not accessible
Access is denied.

When I first installed Vista, I swear I was able to open the Local Settings
folder so that I could manually delete entries from the temp folder.

Personally I think Microsoft went a little overboard with all this
permission stuff.

 

[GBorn]

Single user of computer and am the administrator, upgraded from XP to Home
premium. In explorer in the Users folder with my account name why do some
of the sub-folders such as Application Data, Local Settings, My Documents,
NetHood, Send to, Start Menu have little blue shortcut arrows on the
icons. I cannot open them getting the message:
C:\Users\my name\Local Settings is not accessible
Access is denied.

As far as I understand (I run here a German Vista), you are struggeling with
virtual folders. Thouse entries are not real folders, instead it are NTFS
links (available for compatibility issues and pointing to the Vista folders
aka documents, images etc.).

Here is a German blog
http://blogs.technet.com/dmelanchth...ff-auf-verzeichnisse-unter-windows-vista.aspx
written by a German MS employee Daniel Melanchthon, who discuss this topic
in deepth. Maybe you can use a web-tranlator to read the German text in
english.

And here is another tipp: Just switch off the Explorer ability to show
system folders - it isn't necessary in Windows Vista and it is risky to
enable system file view (because some users are struggeling with the NTFS
links or trying to delete the desktop.ini files ;-).

When I first installed Vista, I swear I was able to open the Local
Settings folder so that I could manually delete entries from the temp
folder.

Personally I think this is bullshit or just a phantasy ;-).

Personally I think Microsoft went a little overboard with all this
permission stuff.

Won't agree. Just work with Vista instead against Vista and everything will
be fine .

Regards

G. Born
www.borncity.de

 

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

Jr

The folders you are looking at that appear to be shortcuts are called
Junctions or Symbolic Links. These folders are used for backward
compatibility, mostly for installation programs that are looking for an old
system folder location. They appear where a system folder location, that was
part of a previous version of Windows, has been changed in Vista. When an
older installation program is installed, these folders will redirect the
installation program to the proper folder in Vista. These folders contain no
user information.

You can use a command prompt to locate the new folder that the Junction
points to.

Go to Start and type cmd and click the cmd.exe program.

The command window should open at the C:\Users\<username> folder.

Type dir /AHL and press the ENTER key. (Note the space in the
command)

The result will be a list of folders on the C: drive.

A typical line will look like this:

<date> <time> <JUNCTION> SendTo
[C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo]

This shows that the information for the old Send To folder is now
contained in the folder that the path points to in the brackets. You should
see all of the junction points with the old name of the folder and the new
location for that folder in Vista.

Another example is the old Documents and Settings folder. This is now
located at C:\Users.

11/02/2006 05:00 AM <JUNCTION> Documents and Settings [C:\Users]