Windows 7: Very strange issue

The background information: Recently I was having a few issues deleting a file off my D: drive (this is not my OS partition.) I ended up modifying a few of the drive's administrative security properties. I gave myself, the only user on this PC, 'Full Control' permissions of this drive. I restarted the machine and when I came back, the partition appeared to be gone. I attempted to locate it in the command prompt with no success. I finally used Disk Management to confirm that the partition was still there, just not accessible. The file format system NTFS was just missing completely..

Anyway, after about a week of trying almost everything I could to repartition the drive (I used everything from disk healing to disk recovery software) the partition magically reappeared. That drive is up and running fine now and that's not really why I'm posting this.

The issue: I am not able to set a background or change any personalization features at all for that matter. I can select a built in theme, but the background images still don't appear. What's more concerning to me is I can't use Explorer or My Computer to navigate into C:\Users\(or beyond.) Now obviously folders exist in C:\Users\username\desktop because I'm able to add and modify files and folders on my desktop.

Does anyone have any advice for this situation? I have not found any success in my research for the solution. Such as: changing Ease of Access features to make sure Remove background images (where available) is not checked.

Thank you for your time,
Brad

Try a System Restore to before you made the security change?

Agreed, ZTrucker. My very first thought. Permissions have changed and need to be restored.

I should have defined that in my original procedures. I did attempt to do a system restore but no restoration points existed. I assumed they were saved on my D: drive. I also couldn't restore backup because that was also missing. I attempted to use the Repair procedure found when booting off the Win7 disk, this did not help either.

This will restore security settings. Don't know if that will do the trick, but here it is...

Please read link carefully before executing command.

Just run in a evalated prompt the following command.
*** EDIT -DELETED by LEMUR ***

The articles does not mention Windows 7 as supported.

Understood. In that case, do not run the above.