I had a similar problem. After using the official method of relocating my user profile folders; Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, and Downloads to a different drive, I was left with ghosted folders of Music, Pictures, and Videos in my original user profile folder. The ghosted folders were missing their special folder properties, and also had no security properties or owner. Every attempt to remove, change permissions, or take ownership of these folders ended with Access Denied, even logged on as the hidden administrator. I was also unable at this point to even reset the newly defined sub-folders back to their original locations receiving the same "access denied" failure.
Even though these 3 folders were taking up no space, it was utterly annoying to have them show up as a second Music, Pictures, and Videos folder every time I opened up my user folder. I spent several hours trying to find a solution on the internet to fix this problem and never did find a solution.
I did manage to figure out a simple way to recover access to these folders and thereby allowing me to remove them by going into the libraries folder and right clicking on each of the library listings for the 3 offending ghosted folders, selecting properties, then you see a list of path locations for both the personal folder (in this case now pointing to my D drive) and the public folder path. Under this window is an option to add a folder. Just click this, and point it to the ghosted folder (for me residing in it's default path of "C:\Users\<username>\Music" and selecting "OK". Once this entry has been created, you can go back to the previously ghosted folder, and see that it now has all of it's security and ownership properties returned, allowing you to safely remove it. Then just do this procedure for each of your remaining ghosted folders. Once you have all the ghosted folders removed, don't forget to go back and remove the now unneeded entry in each of the libraries you added the path definitions to.
I believe the ghosted folders are created if you happened to have shortcuts created for files or folders that used to reside in any of the user profile sub-folders that you moved to the new drive or network share. I noticed that after finally removing my ghosted folders that some of my shortcut links in my quick launch bar were no longer valid as the path definitions were still pointing to the old user profile sub-folder paths.
Hope this helps....
Kevin
When I added a SSD to my computer, I used Easy File Transfer to save the files from my user directory (on the C: drive) to an external drive, reinstalled Windows 7 on the SSD, and then changed the location for Documents, Music, Videos, and Pictures from the SSD (C) to a normal HD (D). I then used Easy File Transfer to restore the files and data I had captured from the previous installation. Along the way, a directory named with my user name was created in the C: root directory, and it contains three folders named music, videos, and pictures. The directories are empty, but I can find no way to delete them. If I try to take ownership, even as an administrator, I am denied permission. I've tried opening a command prompt as an administrator and then using rmdir /s to delete the tree and get denied permission. Since I can go to my user directory on the C: drive and see links to the proper directories on the D: drive that actually contain my documents, music, and such, I know links were created in my normal user directory on C:, but the extra entries directly in the root (not the users) directory are very puzzling. I realize these useless files existing in my C: root are not impairing my system, but it bugs me that I can't do anything with them. Any ideas?
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