Windows with Full Control to Everyone for Everything
Similar to sudo chmod -R 777 /, but for Windows 7. A customer decided he hated the prompts for administrators to continue, so he gave himself Full Control for the Everyone group on Windows 7. Now, some fun issues ensued:
- Programs do not install
- Items normally requiring an Administrator do not run or show the
CONSENT.EXEprogram asking permission - UAC is still on, but not activating (Yes, I checked)
- System Restore does not fix this.
What I would love in an ideal world (which I know is not always the case) is a script that would set the permissions of all the default Windows items in the NTFS ACL list. Barring that, I do understand that a re-install would be necessary... However, since a "repair" install requires Administrative rights, I have a weird feeling it would be a clean install. I don't mind, but it may show the customer that he should ask next time :-P
EDIT Update...
I tried avirk's solution, but that did not work. I also tried soandos's answer of running icacls * /T /Q /C /RESET, but to no avail. I have done a repair install, and am evaluating how it acts (installing updates, installing software, etc).
Solution 1:
Use:icacls * /T /Q /C /RESET
If that does not work you can reset the permissions manually.
If the only thing that that was changed is that Everyone was granted full control to everything, then the solution would be to take away all permissions for everything, then give it read permissions to the necessary system files (Program files, etc).
You can do this though the GUI option in windows explorer (make sure to apply this change to all subfolders as well), or using the icacls command, with the /T flag.