[haloboy100]

So I finally got windows 7 today as a birthday present to replace my bull**** windows XP setup. Long story short, after finishing my customization and reinstalling all of my programs and such, I'm very happy.

One thing, though. I need to put things like save files and preferences (in particular, torrent data for a very long download that I don't want to lose) into my application data folder. The other thing, I don't have permission. I don't even have permission to access ("access is denied") my ****ing c:\documents and settings folder. I have no idea how that could possibly be true. I've double checked that I have administrator privileges and all that crap.
Seeing as how the folder is dated as sometime late 2009, that would imply that it is leftover from my XP installation, which is absolute bull**** as I reformatted my entire HDD before I installed 7.
I seriously have no idea how this is possible and it's really pissing me off.
I also can't access certain folders under the "users/*my username*" folder. This includes my documents, application data, cookies and otherwise.
Even though I can get to the "my documents" folder, which I moved onto my E drive (properly; by going into it's settings) by clicking it from the start menu. The folders, including application data, are hidden and are shortcuts. This implies to me that they don't actually exist and that windows 7 uses them as some kind of weird pointer to where those actual files are. Which brings up this question: Where are those files then?

[The E]

Sometimes, the permission management can get a little ... screwy. Right-click on C:\users\<username>, select Properties, Security tab, Click on advanced, go to the "Owner" tab and take ownership of everything in there, including all subfolders.

As for the files you are (probably) looking for, try %APPDATA%\Roaming (which expands to C:\Users\<username>\AppData).

However, I fear you won't have much luck "transferring" that torrent. Never worked for me when I tried it.

One thing, however: Starting with Vista, what used to be the "My Documents" folder under XP is now the Users\<username> folder. You may have noticed that 7 offers another way of organizing folders by using so-called libraries, which are metas-folders that can contain data from locations all over the HDD (For example, my video library is set to include data from c:\users\<username>\videos and a network share).

[haloboy100]

Alright, I can access the folder now.
that's absolutely insane. Is it supposed to be like that, right out of the box?

And I still don't have access to c:\documents and settings.

[Iss Mneur]

Alright, I can access the folder now.
that's absolutely insane. Is it supposed to be like that, right out of the box?

And I still don't have access to c:\documents and settings.

Yes, it is, that is just how Vista and 7 are.  This is a result of forcing all users, even administrators, to run explorer.exe without administrative credentials.  The escalation of the user's credentials to administrative credentials is what the UAC is prompting about, this is why even the Administrators get prompted by the UAC.

No, and you never will. On windows vista and 7 machines "Documents and Settings" is a junction point (think a hard link on *nix files systems) that points to C:\Users, so to find your profile folder look in C:\Users.  See http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en/vistasecurity/thread/915eecc8-6a07-4d6a-8ca5-468ee51e9484

In an effort to prevent applications that don't understand junction points or don't need to understand them, the junction points themselves are *never* browse-able.  IE, you can not list the files that are contained in C:\Documents and Settings, but you can list the files in C:\Documents and Settings\UserName, which in fact is the same folder as C:\Users\UserName.  This is done as a backwards compatibility feature so that the bad software out there that hardcodes C:\Documents and Settings as the user profile location rather than asking the OS where the user profiles are stored (this also causes problems for people that do not have the profiles on drive C: for whatever reason).

[haloboy100]

ah, makes sense.
Thanks for the help all.

[S-99]

Yeah, whodathunk that the file hirearchy might be different in a new version of windows. 7 is not xp, you can only get so far treating 7 as xp.

[QuantumDelta]

http://www.tech-forums.net/pc/f9/admin-rights-vista-windows-7-a-197772/

For Iss Mneur's consideration (read; don't do this unless you know what you're doing but it was relevant to the point) ;p