Access denied to Application Data shortcut/folder? 2

[jsteph]

Hi all,
In vista h.p., i'm logged on as 'me', which under User accounts says Administrator. I have UAC turned off.

Yet when I try to open the Shortcut to Application Data (I think it's a shortcut--it has that shortcut curved arrow icon but under properties it says Type: File Folder, and the Target is blank), I get the popup error "Access Denied".

Same if I try to go the directly to the folder:
C:\users\me\Application Data (in this view, the folder icon is also a 'shortcut' icon??).

If I right-click and go to Security, it shows me as having Full Control. It also lists Administrators group as full control. The Everyone user shows blank for all permissions, but when I go into Advanced, it shows Deny for the Everyone user.

How can I look in this folder?
Thanks,
--Jim

 

[jsteph]

Ok, I've figured it out--no, I haven't 'figured it out', I've gotten past the problem--the 'whys and hows' still elude me.

I set the Windows Explorer shorcut to 'Run as Administrator', and now I can view the folder.

But what I haven't figured out is: I *am* the administrator, so why isn't everything I do 'as administrator'?. There is one user only listed in User Accounts and that's "me", Administrator. I logged on as me so I could do 'administrative tasks', otherwise I'd have created another user with lower privileges, and logged on as that user.

So can anyone tell me what's going on here? When I log on as the Administrator user, is Vista saying "no, I bet he doesn't want to really do that. Let's log him in as a secret, invisible lower user because we know better"? This baffles me. If anyone can shed light on this it would be a great help,
Thanks,
--Jim

 

[BadBigBen]

that is by design, an administrative user is NOT the Administrator... note the capital 'A'...

now that account can be activated:

Enable the (Hidden) Administrator Account on Windows 7 or Vista

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...idden-administrator-account-on-windows-vista/

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[linney]

When I queried these folders early on the piece with Microsoft, this is the reply I got.

"Application Data folder



Hi, this is a known and reported issue. It was resolved as won't fix. Here is the reason behind it. "The junctions are there to only provide appcompat for legacy apps and aren’t meant for a user to traverse through. The junctions have been explicitly set to block read through them by setting Everyone Deny Read. The main reason here is because these are just links to the actual location, so you dont want backup tools and other tools operating on your data twice, once from the original path and once via the junctions. There are scenarios where some of these junctions actually form a loop to support the appcompat for the old namespace in comparison to the new and in those cases allowing read through them is disastrous, for e.g. setup was broken for a week when the file system wasnt honorign the deny read.

Also as far as a user goes, you will never see these as they are system hidden, and you will need to take explicit action to see them by default."

Hope this clears up some confusion.

 

[jsteph]

Thank you both!
--Jim

 

[smah]

In addition to info that BadBigBen and Linney have provided, the reason that a user with administrative credentials might not be able to do certain things is the concept of least privilege. This concept is the basis for User Account Control.