Problem of week 36 (2)

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Well, the previous problem was not that hard, so I'll give you an other one; a bit harder this time.

I have a program which have been running fine for ages. Suddenly it complains it can not write to its files.
I have plenty of harddisk space and with the files is nothing wrong; I can open them and write to them using notepad or whatever.
Then I noticed the read only checkmark in the folder properties, but dimmed as if it was inherited. I checked the parent folder, but that was normal. When I removed the checkmark it would reappear again next time I looked.

What is going on here and how to fix it?

 

It is a memberserver in a 2003 network, but that is not inportant for this problem.

 

Hey, what's this? No clues at all? No single response in 4 days? Is this problem to hard?

 

Um yes

Could this be a disc quota limit reached issue?

 

No, that's not it. No disk quota is set.
This problem is very subtile. It took me some time to find out what happened and I had to use technet this time to find the solution. (I seldom need technet)

 

No, everything was local.

 

wow, use to know this but have since long forgotten. Is it encrypted?

 

just a guess, but are the folders part of a parent folder and is the parent set to read only or have the permissions on the parent folder been changed?

 

is the filesystem ntfs or fat ?

 

Any inheritance going on?

 

No, it is not encrypted.

 

The parent folders are not set to read only. There is no inheritence involved. In fact, is has nothing to do with read only, allthou the indicater says so. (This should be the 1000 dollar clue)

 

The file system is NTFS.

 

No, nothing of the kind.

 

Perhaps the account that the program uses has lost the rights to the directory. Potentially, the account has been locked out due to an expired or changed password.

 

Ok, no one even got close to the answer. Here it is.

It took me allmost one week to find the connection.
When you customize a folder, microsoft uses the read-only attribute to indicate that the folder is customized. Some programs do not look at the files, but at the folder attributes instead.
The cure to this problem is to tell windows to use the system attribute instead of the read-only attribute. This is done by changing the registry. Than you have to reset the read-only attribute by hand using the attrib command, for all files one by one.

 

So who *customised* the folder?

 

When you just click the button, even if you do nothing, that's enough.