I have been running Windows 7 and Vista (sp2) in a dual boot environment for some time. They share a data partition and I have never had a problem with permissions until the last day or two. Now I find that when I go back to Vista after using Win 7 for a day, I am being denied access to my main folders, such as pictures, documents, etc.for saving files. I even had trouble opening a Quicken file, with the "user does not have access to this file" message. What could have suddenly caused this problem. It is quite annoying because changing the permission for the main folder is not sufficient to change the permissions for individual files. I get error messages saying there was an error changing the permission for "XXX" file, naming many files that could not be changed. I have to change each file individually, whichis quite time consuming. I need to solve this before I can continue using the Windows 7 OS. Any ideas? I can't think of anything that is new except that I installed Netframework 1.1 (plus theservice packs)on both OS's to install an application that needed it.

Have you recently been tinkering with the Windows 7 Homegroup ? If so that may be the cause of your problems. Do a search on "access denied" or look here : http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprogeneral/thread/c0f0fcd4-190e-499b-914e-43efc23c1441It seems like Windows 7 RC1has a major bug with Homegroup that can cause all kinds of seemingly unrelated security problems.

Thank you. Yes, I did recently try to get find out what the Homegroup was all about and made a few changes or turned on some of the features. That could be the problem. I hope they fix this, because lots of people will run Win7 as a dual boot, at least at firstuntil they know they can run everything ok in the new OS. I thought the Homegroup was supposed to be easy, but I'm finding it much harder to connect with other computers using Win7 than I did with Vista. It isn't that intuitive and I wasn't sure what I had to enable to make it work.

I dual boot XP and W7 (separate partitions) but I 'share' the same folder from the XP partition with both OSs. I've had lots of problems with security settings not actually working when going from one OS to the other. If I save a file using XP then go into W7 the inheritance is broken on that file (it shows it as though it is correct but it isn't) - just removing the inheritance and putting it back fixes it. This obviously isn't your problem with Homegroups, but it probably doesn't help! In my opinion MSs attempts to simplify file sharing make too many assumptions about what you want to do (Which is fair enough as it's supposed to help people who haven't got the first idea). However, if you've got a good idea what you are doing, it's probably better to do it yourself and ignore 'Homegroups', 'Simple Sharing' or whatever it's called this month. After all, even MS don't expect it to be used in a corporate environment (ie where people who know what they're doing set it up). Having said all that, I have read comments that it is very easy to set up (As long as you don't mind what it does to your security settings!).