Insufficient permissions to run explorer.exe?

Pham Nuwen

"Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item."

My account's an administrator, always has been. I copied explorer.exe to an entirely different drive, ran takeown from the command line, and I've also removed all permissions from it via an other admin account. Any method for executing explorer has the same result, super+e, command line, even run as administrator, no luck.

Does it sound like my user credentials are hosed or something? I'm just grasping at straws with that guess. What do you guys suggest?

Pham Nuwen

Updates on behavior of issue:

I can launch windows explorer fine from an other user account. However if, from that other account, I try to "run as different user", and select the account I'm having the problem with, it fails there as well with the same error described above.

Additionally, if from within the problem account, I attempt to run explorer.exe as the user from the known working account, nothing happens for about two minutes, but then I get "Sever execution failed"

citizen059

Have you tried creating a copy of explorer.exe and giving it a different name - like "happy.exe", and then running it?

If a renamed copy runs, that user account might have something (malware?) blocking it from launching explorer.

If the copy doesn't run, my solution would be to just recreate the profile considering that it runs from others. If you've been logged in as that profile, reboot the computer and log in as a different one. Rename the profile folder so you have any favorites/documents still there to copy over, and then create the profile again (or just log in if it's a domain account).

You COULD spend time chasing the issue to figure out exactly what's wrong, but IMO the quickest solution is to just recreate the profile.

ronya

Is this XP? It's possible that an Explorer toolbar, installed to the problem account, has stopped working.

Pham Nuwen

(replying fast gotta go to work) It's windows 7 pro 64, no explorer does not run when renamed, nor does it run if copied from an other computer to a flash drive and attempted to run here, even renamed, yes it runs fine (the copy, and the local version) from other profiles.

I'm pretty sure it's an ntuser credentials issue or something. This started when I copied my users/myuserprofile/ to a different drive (was running out of c: space), and made a junction (mklink /j) [linux calls them hardlinks] to the new location. That, in and of itself, I know didn't do it, but I think a file or two might have gotten missed. I didn't delete the local copy on c: though, just renamed it. The weird part is, when I put everything back to the way it was, vis a vis deleting the junction, and renaming my profile from profile.old back to profile, the issue remains even though technically nothing's changed now.

ronya

Yes, you owned your profile. I don't recommend trying to fix it, if it is at all possible to avoid doing so, because it can be damn near impossible to revert everything to the way it was, and you risk having permissions more liberal than they should be.

Roll a new profile and copy your settings over, if possible.

Grismar

Would have to agree with ronya, sounds like that profile is toast.

There's no way I know of to get that profile back to the actual technical same it was before. Just putting the files back in the same location won't cut it. They need to have the exact same authorisation and just the fact that they weren't there for a bit (and Windows had no 100% sure way of knowing where they went) makes it a wise decision on the part of the OS to decide something fishy may be up. You know and I know you are you, but how can Windows know?..

Tbh, I hate the current "solution" to security and access rights management in Windows 7 as much as I imagine you do right now, but the best way to deal with it is to have the OS sit on its own drive, manage its own junk and put everything you actually care about on other volumes and run a system backup from time to time...

If, for some reason, you still feel the urge to fix the situation: have some form of backup somewhere, if only to look at for reference? Or perhaps a system restore point? Another approach, if you have spare time on your hands, would be to look at the structure and rights of a working Windows 7 installation and see if you can spot the difference. But given the piece of junk interface Windows offers to the whole rights nightmare, I imagine that would be about as much fun as removing your own molar with a rusty pair of pliers.

Tofystedeth

For saving space on a smaller system drive, I used a similar approach to yours but not as drastic. I left the bulk of the profile folder there. All I had on the other drive was the documents/pictures/music. That way it doesn't lose your ntuser.dat or anything. And that's where the bulk of your space used is most of the time.

Pham Nuwen

I've mostly given up on trying to repair the profile. It seems more trouble than its worth given that I'm going to reinstall windows anyway when I buy an SSD.

That brings me back to the same issue though; when I do reinstall, I need to figure out the proper method for setting up the junction so that this doesn't happen again. Rather than doing an individual user account, I'm planning on junctioning the whole think.

mklink /J C:\Users \Users

It's not going to be sufficient to move only My Documents off the ssd; that's not where the bulk of the space is coming from in my case. It's in AppData. About 30 gigs worth; that's got to be somewhere else. Also Minecraft save files, with its thousands of tiny files for chunk saving, eat ssd's read/write health alive. No, appdata, and the entire profile, needs to be somewhere else, and it must be done with a Junction (hardlink) because far too many programs still foolishly hard code to C:\Users\ or C:\Documents and Settings for that matter, instead of following wild cards or environment variables. It needs to be seamless to the OS and to all applications, and the only way to do that is with a Junction.

The problem I'm having though is this needs to be done with administrator level privledges. In my experiments, I've wound up with a lot of duplicate recreations of accounts in C:\Users\Username.Computername000-999 but without it actually pushing through to the other drive. This shit is so much fucking easier in linux.

Tofystedeth

I would still recommend against moving the entire profile, since if for whatever reason the system can't find the other drive when it's booting, it'll hose your profile again. Move the specific items that are causing trouble. Your system won't cry if it can't locate your Minecraft saves. I haven't had any issues doing that with the Junction tool from Sysinternals.

ronya

You can try this, but as Tofystedeth noted, it is potentially explosive if something else goes wrong. Junction points don't work so perfectly that everything works with them. Windows Update can choke on it, as do a variety of other sufficiently old or low-level system tools.

Just music, videos, and saved games, right? Are you hoarding raw data of some kind in there? Junctioning /music or /documents out is much less potentially destructive than dragging out a whole profile. Never mind all profiles.