Vista Ultimate: Access denied on shortcuts

~J~ · 23 Mar 2007 at 20:12

Just turned the PC on, went into "My Pictures" and got told that access was denied!

Looking at the icon, it has one of those shortcut icons pointing to 'somewhere'.

After taking ownership of the folder, I've now noticed that all the "Documents and Settings" folders have this arrow, I don't have access, and more and more folders within "Documents and Settings" are starting to have these shortcut icons on them!

Any ideas what the hell is going on?

csmager · 23 Mar 2007 at 20:19

Sounds like you did an upgrade - not a fantastic idea when so much has changed.

If you did (or even if you didn't), might be an idea to create a new user account and copy the files into that.

~J~ · 23 Mar 2007 at 20:23

Definately no upgrade, had full and final version since the MSDN release in November 2006.

Nothing new installed, just turned on now and shortcuts everywhere, like "AppData", I've a backup of my documents on another drive, that's shortcut to somewhere else and I've no access until I take ownership.

csmager · 23 Mar 2007 at 20:27

Where's Documents and Settings & My Pictures coming from then? Vista has no Documents and Settings folder, and the 'My' prefix was dropped.

Still unsure as to how you've managed to come unstuck, but a new userprofile would probably sort it.

~J~ · 23 Mar 2007 at 20:44

Well that's just it. The "Documents and Settings" as you rightly say shouldn't be available, but it's there now (which it wasn't last night) and the "My Pictures", "My Music", "My Videos" held in the "Users" directory (Vista specific) now point as shortcuts to the "Documents and Settings".

Damn weird.

Fr0dders · 23 Mar 2007 at 21:48

sounds like a browser hijack to me

and whatever malware is installed is attempting to re-direct you somewhere

except of course your on vista, where c:\documents and settings doesnt exist.

DDL · 24 Mar 2007 at 13:18

~J~ said:
Well that's just it. The "Documents and Settings" as you rightly say shouldn't be available, but it's there now (which it wasn't last night) and the "My Pictures", "My Music", "My Videos" held in the "Users" directory (Vista specific) now point as shortcuts to the "Documents and Settings".

Damn weird.

Actually the headings for all those documents are still there in vista but you cannot normally see them - have you turned on the option to show hidden files and folders?

Microsoft have confused everyone by introducing two new things that share the 'shortcut' icon, the same icon is now used for: shortcuts, Junctions and something else that i can't quite remember at the moment.

Anyway what your looking at now is a 'Junction' not a shortcut. Microsoft have made Documents and Settings etc, Junctions in Vista and you do not have access to it. It is a sort of short cut exclusively for code, so that when you install a program that was not written for Vista and tries to put stuff in those old areas it gets redirected to the new locations, but you can't do anything with them.

Hope that helps a little