Windows permissions issue. why did all my folders lose their permissio

[HAL9002]

back story here
Okay so here’s what I did.
I have like three different accounts on my computer. One of which is an administrator account of course.
I went to one of the non-administrative accounts on my computer.
And through my non-administrative account I tried to access some files from my administrative account.
It asked for a password which I expect. After I gave a password it would not load the contents of the folder.
I tried several times and it would not load.
Keep in mind this entire time I was logged in to my administrator’s account still. I never properly logged out.
When I went to the non-administrators account I simply switched accounts.
I don’t know if that has anything to do with anything I didn’t think it would cause a problem.

the real problem
So anyway I logged out of the non-administrative account.
And I signed back in to my administrators account so that I could log out, in hopes that that would somehow fix it. And lo and behold all the folders on my desktop on my administrators account… all the folders icons have a little lock in the bottom left corner. They never had that before.
And so apparently none of these folders have any user permissions on them.
And that looks to be the case for every single folder on my administrators account.

Here’s what it says when I go into a folders properties and click on the security tab.

“No permissions have been assigned for this object.
Warning: this is a potential security risk because anyone who can access this object can take ownership of it. The object’s owner should assign permissions as soon as possible.”

So apparently I should assign permissions to all these folders so that there is not a security risk?
Short of assigning permissions to every single last folder on my C drive.
Is there some way I can reset the permissions to default or something?
Certainly there was some sort of default permissions before all these little tiny locks showed up all over the top of my folder icons.

I really don’t understand or why this happened. and I don’t really know what needs to happen to fix it.
Most everything seems to be working properly. it's not like im locked out of folders or anything. Except for that sharing files and folders between accounts on my computer seems to be a lot more complicated than ever had to be before.
everything looked fine before today. I don't know what the crap happened.
What should I do?

 

[Slartybart]

Is this apparent only on your User folders/files or every folder/file on a volume C:\ for instance

If it's only your files, here is what I believe the default security settings are
Try adding the principal Everyone with read, traverse, and execute rights

I'm on Win8, so the words might be different on Win7 I forget the exact wording.
I think those rights might be included in one tickbox [read] , but you also want traverse/list.

If you post a screenshot showing the security settings, that would help - use the advanced screen, not the basic one

See: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-screenshots-files-upload-post-seven-forums.html