Insufficient permissions to run explorer.exe?

C

Cronyx

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 24, 2005
Messages
146
"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?
 
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"
 
Have you checked for viruses and malware?

Other than that, I would take the lazy route... create another admin account on the machine, back up all the necessary files within your user profile, then wipe it. It's easier than playing guessing games.
 
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 D:\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.

The information my googlefu is returning is that part it needs to be done during the instalation, but before you finalize it. I can't find the link again, but there was a way to go into a temporary administrator account to install software and drivers, which is what Dell, etc, do before making a master image to burn into new hard drives. After you exit this temp admin account, you continue the install, and the open box new user walkthrough begins as normal.
 
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