Links don't work

March 18, 2009 11:52 AM

Link icons -- Location not available -- Access is denied

I'm running Vista Home Premium in non-Administrator mode, as the user US, and Word 2007.

Links (icons with an arrow inside) work fine from the desktop, but in the directory tree ("Computer"), when I click on a link icon (such as My Music), instead of following the link, I get an error message "Location is not available" -- "C:\Users\US\Documents\My Music is not accessible." -- "Access is denied."

This also happens when I navigate down the directory tree to My Music (which is also a link).

And it also in Word 2007 in the Open Document list.

Has the current directory tree become un-synchronized with the table in Windows Explorer? If so, how do I rebuild it?

Or do I need to grant the user US blanket permission to access links? If so, I can log in as the Administrator, but then what do I do?

posted by KRS to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Warning: I am not in front of a Vista machine to really help you with this.

I have a suspicion you're getting confused by the junction points that Vista puts among the filesystem. You can read about them here, but, basically, what these links do is provide backward compatibility for older applications that may try to use the old XP style paths to common folders like My Music. These points appear all over the file system. They look like shortcuts and point to directories the user can already access through a less circuitous route. It becomes very confusing under two circumstances:

1. You attempt to double-click the link. This produces the "access is denied" error.
2. You attempt to find out the size of, say, a user's profile with diruse, which counts the files in a location _and the files as pointed to by a symbolic link._ The can artificially inflate the size of the profile quite a bit.

The most common one is the "Documents and Settings" junction on the system drive. You'll see the folder. It has a shortcut icon. Double-click on it and you'll get an Access Denied error. However, were a program want to get to your user accounts via the "Documents and Settings" path, it can do that. Applications access paths at a different permissions level.

These junctions point to the same folders you have access to already. So, let's say you were to take ownership of the junctions and allow yourself access to the junction and where it's pointing via the junction (C:\Documents and Settings\US\My Music), you would simply find yourself in the Music folder that already exists in your user folder in Vista. No difference.

I suggest you don't alter the permissions on those folders. Simply put, I don't know what changing ownership or permissions would do to them.

Hope this helps,

Mike...
posted by tcv at 1:11 PM on March 18, 2009