Infinite Application Data

I just recently got this issue, and fell into it the exact same way - attempting to take ownership where I apparently wasn't supposed to. Basically I ran the dos command to give myself ownership of everything on C:\.

I would never have noticed this but firefox stopped working. I could only run firefox as administrator.

I got lucky, had a system restore point from 5 days ago and went back to it. Took a very long time (1 hour plus, which from what I read means something is broken and it will hang). But it eventually did complete, had a hung boot and an unexpected reboot. Third try was the charm, windows has booted and firefox now runs without using run as administrator.

The recursive appdata shortcut/junction thing was still there but I followed flemur's advice and deleted it. Everything within appdata except the shortcut got backed up to another folder.

It seems to be fine, none of my commonly used programs are crashing. So if anyone else googled their way to this, hope this helps.

All,

Thanks for all your help and knowledge. Here is what I ended up doing and it only took a few minutes.

a) Download a program called JunctionBox
b) Extract
c) Run JunctionBox.exe
d) Select "All Profiles and System Junctions" from dropdown.
d) Click "Backup Junctions" button.
e) Name the backup file whatever and let it do its thing.
f) Click "Restore Junctions" button.
g) Select "DefaultJunctions.ntj"
h) Let it do its thing.
i) When you look in Windows Explorer, some of your folders will have little arrows on them that look like the "Shortcut to.." arrows. Those are the junctions that have been restored.
j) When you click on them, you get the "Access is denied" error message that I hate.
k) That was easy and it all looks good now. I'll post if I find out otherwise.


You do not need to re-install if you do this procedure

Here is the link to download this program: Download Junction Box from SourceForge.net

Good Luck