why don't I have access to anything?

Just installed 7 Home Premium 64 a few days ago. Every damn thing I try to do is met with a message saying that I don 't have access to that folder or I need to click on a box to grant Administrator privileges. I'm logged in as Administrator!

My two most pressing concerns are:

• I can't get into the Start Menu folder to set up groups. This "Show All Programs" stuff is bull. I have roughly 200 programs on here and twenty or thirty that I run every day, I can go searching through a three page list to find what I need.
• I can't extract anything from WINRAR because access is denied. I don't have privs to create the directories and when I manually create them it won't write to them.

I don't have permission to see into most of the Documents and Settings folders and there have been numerous other situations where I've been prevented from looking at files on my own machine. What is the problem here?

Your link led me to information that enabled me to fix my issues with the Start menu, and I'm grateful.

I still have issues with WINRAR. It can't create folders and fails because the folder doesn't exist. If I create a folder and tell it to write there, it tells me access denied. The new folder is owned by Administrators, of which I'm the only one. Fortunately, I still have my XP machine up and can move files over there to process them. That has only limited success when installing new software though, as many applications write to several unrecorded locations.

I've had trouble with many folders owned by Administrators, and just now I tried to save a copy of the hosts file and it told me "You don't have permission to write to this location. Contact the Administrator to obtain permission". That particular folder was owned by TrustedInstaller, but if Microsoft's idea of ownership and protection is to deny access to the creator of a directory or to tell an administrator to contact himself, then it's no wonder that Ballmer is out and customers are leaving them for Android and Apple.

By the way, that Take Ownership Of File link needs to be amended to tell users to find out who owns the file/folder before they take new ownership. It later recommends that they revert ownership when maintenance is complete, but by then you don't know who to hand it back to. Which leaves you open to hacker attempts. I thought that Administrator ownership was supposed to be protecting system files from hackers anyway. Where I come from, Administrator/Installer/System are all the same thing and you don't have all these layers of complexity.

I need some help here people. My system is non-functional. I can't do any work. Although all of my folders claim to have read/write access for both Administrator and User, I can't install programs, can't unzip files, can't save Photoshop. Everything I do gives me a denied access message. Sometimes it writes the file anyway, sometimes it names modified files to x9xx99x.tmp and I have no idea what the file used to be named. I've hit so many roadblocks that it's difficult to see the correct path, but the majority of the problems seem to stem from running programs that write to other areas.

It often seems as though the system doesn't recognize me as Administrator. I've checked the user account and verified that I am. I don't seem to have a problem writing to "My xxxx", which are owned by me. But I have trouble with anything owned by Administrator, and most things are.

Reading is less of a problem now, as I work out all these false directories that point somewhere else (it would be nice if they weren't protected so that I could see where they pointed). The majority of the problem is with writing. On one of the directories that I had problems with, I gave users full control and was able to write to it. That directory was owned by Administrator and had privileges set for System and Users, but my username was not on the list. I expected to have access based on Administrator, which already had full control.

I'm also having enormous problems with Search. It never finds files until I run it from the directory that the file is in. But I'm saving that topic for after I sort out these protection issues.

Barman58 said:

In Win7, (and Vista), the first user is a member of the administrators group but runs with reduced rights as standard, if required you can right click on an executable and select to run as administrator which will cure most issues you are seeing.

Unfortunately, you can't right-click when you're unzipping files. Unless maybe if I brought up WINRAR separately as Admin, then went searching for files to extract. The same applies with Photoshop. Right now I'm running everything from an Admin account because I'm building a file system on top of new hardware. But soon I'll be running all of these programs from a user account and I won't be able to run as Admin.

Barman58 said:

Win7 is designed to work with all your files located in a user area - this area is now held under the Users\UserName tree, (The Documents & Settings entry is now a link to the actual area involved and does not actually exist). If you have older software that was designed for XP and did not use the correct coding to access files you will often find access denied errors.

This is a large problem for me and requires a reorganization of methods acquired over thirty-five years of computing. My work doesn't always fall into discrete categories like My Video, My Pictures, My Music. I'm not a housewife balancing budgets and exchanging photos of the kids. I can adjust but it will take some time. The whole reason for being an Administrator instead of a User is so that one has system privileges and can go anywhere and do anything.

Barman58 said:

If you have a data file storage area outside your "personal Files" you can release these for use by using the properties - security system to manually assign full rights to yourself by giving your actual username these rights, this may be applied to the root folder of any tree you have and will cascade down to the lower levels

Most of my user files are on a separate disk and I can move more of them there. Opening up protection should be relatively harmless because there aren't any operating system files there. Again, it's a major adjustment but I can't fight Microsoft's vision this late in the game.

Barman58 said:

This may seem a complex method when coming from XP but is actually a variation of the dual user system that has been used in professional network systems since before XP was released

I come from VMS microcomputers. They built them secure from the start and didn't worry about malware. Whatever this dual user system is, I've never seen it. We had user groups, but system administrators had god privilege or could get it with just a click. If a file was owned by System and I had an account in the system group, I did not need to own the directory to gain access to it. The error messages were more informative as well.

VistaKing said:

Remove your CS 5.1 if you require further assistance .

I don't understand what you're saying. It would be wonderful if you can solve my current problems but I'd like more information than "remove this and see what happens". I'd like to know what you saw in those log files so that I might be able to learn more about how things work.

The CS 5.1 install actually failed yesterday and it senses a potential reboot (which I haven't scheduled) so it refuses to run until then. My problems began earlier than the CS5 install. I don't know what the problem was because the error screen was confusing and went away when I clicked for more help.

In any case, I have a disk workout running that appears to have about twelve hours to go. A Photoshop uninstall requires a reboot so I won't be doing that until tomorrow morning.