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I believe I have got into some authority problem - but I am stuck. My guess is that the problem ocured due to lack of disk space, which is fine by now.

This is what I deal with:

  1. One of the admin users on my laptop is unable to run common programs, such as Chrome and Adobe Reader, because the programs cannot read the user settings.
  2. When the same user try to run a program from "Windows menu" > Run, nothing is found. For example cmd.exe or msconfig.msc

What I have done so far:

  • A. Deleted temporary data using the windows clean up tool.

  • B. I checked the environment variables but they look fine.

  • C. I went into the user directory and ran takeown /F appData /A /R

After C. the user is able to start Chrome, but settings are not read.

Also, I should say, on the laptop there is a standard user and an other administrator, they do not have these problems.

Any suggestion is more than welcome!

AD - Stop Putin -
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  • Can you delete and recreate the affected user's account? There may be registry issues as well which would be hard to identify and fix en masse. – I say Reinstate Monica Mar 08 '18 at 09:51
  • @TwistyImpersonator I guess that is possible and I believe the issue would pass. However I would prefer not to do so, because this user have many special things such as mapped drives outside the network - hence I hope for an other suggestion for now. – AD - Stop Putin - Mar 08 '18 at 09:58
  • Then use [ProcMon](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon) to determine what's preventing the user from execute programs. – I say Reinstate Monica Mar 08 '18 at 10:00

1 Answers1

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The best solution would be to recreate the user's account. Based on the fact other accounts are working normally it's safe to assume the problem is user profile specific and not system wide.

However, if that's not an option, then you can use Microsoft's Process Monitor to identify what actions are falling when you start applications:

  1. Run ProcMon
  2. Click the filter icon in the taskbar
  3. Configure the filter to exclude operations that result in SUCCESS
  4. Try to start an application and observe the results.

Hopefully it will be obvious what's preventing programs from running (e.g. Filesystem access denied issues or attempts to read registry data that are falling).

I say Reinstate Monica
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  • Thanks for the tip, but this was rather messy due to too many failures. In the end I removed the user leaving me with the problem to restore things, sometimes that is the quickest way. Once more, thanks! – AD - Stop Putin - Mar 08 '18 at 12:01
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    @AD. Yw. I suspected you'd find a mess which is why I jumped straight to the suggestion to recreate the profile. Been there, done that, and agree with you there were too many issues to fix. – I say Reinstate Monica Mar 08 '18 at 12:06
  • Please consider marking this answer accepted given that the suggestion to recreate the user account did solve the problem. – I say Reinstate Monica Mar 14 '18 at 10:31