Access Denied to "Documents and Settings" on Vista

Please help me before I defenestrate my computer!

I'm trying to browse to folder "c:/Documents and settings" on my MS Vista-machine and I keep getting an access denied window. Where do I change the settings so that I can access all folders on my computer.

Facts: I'm the administrator and only user on this computer, and I have turned user account control off.

Have searched superuser for a solution, but in my agitated state I may well have missed the answer.

Thanks folks!

Solution 1:

You can't open "Documents and settings" in Vista. In fact it doesn't exist anymore. It's just a pointer to the new location which you will find under c:\users.

Solution 2:

The folders \Documents and Settings is a junction (pointer) to the \Users directory. In fact, if you look in your user directory itself (\Users\username) you'll see that there are quite a few folders like Application Data and Local Settings that you can't open.

These folder junctions are to hand hold poorly written programs that hard code paths in their program (like always assuming the Program Files folder will be Program Files when in fact, in a different language it can be something else entirely! If you install a German copy of Windows it will be Programme).

Hopefully, if you turned off UAC just for trying to browse this folder, you'll see that it won't let you in at all (since it's just there for legacy purposes) you'll turn UAC back on, otherwise you're running almost as insecure as XP is.