Security: Unable to display current owner

same thing happened to me. restart fixed it!


Microsoft provides a freeware tool written by a third-party in the download section:

FILEACL v3.0.1.6

It's a NTFS Permissions command line tool. It allows to manipulate ACLs on NTFS volumes:

  • change permissions masks
  • take ownership
  • manipulate inheritance
  • report permissions and apply them elsewhere
  • view raw or SDDL version of security information

*FILEACL is not a Microsoft tool, therefore Microsoft cannot provide any kind of support regarding this tool, please refer to the third party web site below for any support request.*

Here you can find how to use this tool (command line switches etc.): documentation.


Others pointed out that this can be fixed by restarting - this is because this issue is can be caused by applications keeping file handles opened. I experienced this with TortoiseGit's background TGitCache process, which somehow kept hold of repository folders even after I deleted them. Killing the process made those folders disappear.

In this case restarting explorer.exe to kill all shel extensions would probably do the trick.