Explorer++ Windows 11

[Mario Roby]

Inthis case, I am always challenged with the task of traversing directories using my administrative user via the Windows Explorer where regular users do not have "read" permissions. The possible two approaches to this problem so far:

change the ACLs to the directory in question to include my user (Windows conveniently offers the Continue button in the "You don't currently have permissions to access this folder" dialog. This obviously sucks since more often than not I do not want to change ACLs but just look into the folder's contents

What I would love to see would be a way to run Windows Explorer in elevated mode. I have yet to find out how to do so. But other suggestions solving this problem in an unobtrusive way without changing the entire system's configuration (and preferably without the need for downloading / installing anything) are very welcome, too.

I have seen this post with a suggestion for altering HKCR - interesting, but it changes the behavior for all users, which I am not allowed to do in most situations. Also, some folks have suggested using UNC paths to access the folders - unfortunately this does not work when accessing the same machine (i.e. \\localhost\c$\path) as the "Administrators" group membership is still stripped from the token and a re-authentication (and thus the creation of a new token) would not happen when accessing localhost.

1. Open an administrative command prompt.

2. Start the task manager and expand out More details

3. Rt-click Windows Explorer and choose End task

4. Type in explorer in to the elevated command prompt and press enter.

Take note, once you do this you may have a hard time not running a program elevated. Any program you double click or open via file association will also run elevated.

If Explorer is set to "Launch folder windows in a separate process" (Folder Options > View), the folder windows will not be elevated even though the main explorer process is. Workaround is to disable this option so that all folder windows are part of the elevated explorer process.

Instead think about using a different tool to do your file management. I think Explorer is not a good tool to do serious work with many files anyways. A program with two panes side by side is much better suited for this.

There are many Explorer-replacement tools out there, some free, some commercial. All of them can be run elevated so permissions are no longer a problem. You may even want to use two different ones. One for normal usage, one for elevated administrative usage.

Several people have contributed that this behaviour is one of the points of the UAC: to make you stop and think about what you are about to do. One response to this view, already stated, is that being asked once is fine, but not being asked every. single. time. during what might be a somewhat drawn-out procedure. It is somewhat analogous to not wanting to have to use your house key every time you went from one room to another within the house.

But I want to point out a semantic difference between OP's situation and the usual UAC prompt situation: The explorer message with the prompt "You don't currently have permissions to access this folder" is not conceptually the same as the standard UAC prompt.

When you OK a regular UAC request, you are permitting the program to run elevated (that is, with the credentials of the Administrators group); this granting ends when the program terminates. The only lasting effects are whatever the program may have done while elevated.

When you OK the explorer prompt produced when you try exploring into a folder that you don't have permission to view, you are not running anything elevated. Instead you are altering the file system permissions (ACLs) to grant your own user Full Control access to the folder. Not only is the granted permission far wider than the read/traverse folder permissions that exploring requires, this permission is essentially permanent (until someone explicitly removes it), rather than just for the duration of the explorer's visit to the folder.

If the prompt actually meant running the explorer using the Administrators group credentials, that would be a different matter and much more analogous to the regular UAC prompt (this appears to be what happens if you are prompted to use Administrator powers to view/edit permissions in the Advanced Security Settings form). This would, of course, only work if the Administrators actually had the required access as the Administrators group does not have carte blanche to bypass file system permissions. I haven't found a good explanation of this, but ultimately all the Administrators group seems to get is a default "allow full control", and file access is not assured because it can be denied using explicit "Deny" permissions.

As an aside, while testing out access permissions for this article, I observed that changing the ownership of an object will, at times, alter ACL entries for the OWNER built-in principal (which goes under various names depending on the Windows version) so that they apply to "Nothing" rather one of the usual choices (e.g. "this folder"). This occurred at least twice to ACLs that Deny access to the Owner.

One other observation is that is is very difficult to determine what behaviour is the bare behaviour of the file system, and what is added embellishments from the UI being used to modify the permissions (in this case the Advanced Security Settings form of the Windows Explorer). For instance at one point, the TAKEOWN command-line tool would (correctly) allow an unprivileged user who happened to be granted "Take Ownership" access to take ownership of a folder, which the Advanced Security Settings insisted that Administrators credential be entered before doing this.

After wasting time, as usual, with Dropbox's assistance, I try to ask here. My problem is relatively simple to explain and consists in the fact that if I use Windows Explorer, navigating in the Dropbox folder is torture since any operation it's very slow (creating a folder, copying a file, etc...) while if I use, for example (but it couldn't be the solution) a file explorer like Explorer++ everything works perfectly. Another thing I verified is that if I navigate to the Dropbox folder from a Windows window that opens for example when I want to open/save a file, everything works without problems. The problem remains confined to windows explorer. Can anybody help me? Thank you

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It appears that a volume is not formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but I did not see that in your steps to format the drive. I thought that "Erasing" the drive was all that was needed, and that it would format as part of that operation.

Do I have it right that your guide 6185 creates the .dmg on the desktop, then after all steps are completed, I then need to convert from .dmg to .raw, then burn to USB from Apple desktop using Rufus on a PC or something like that?

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@truus22 I've used Winaero Tweaker, which allows setting Taskbar back to "the old days" adding new toolbars. Ita also changes the majority of windows UI back to old also. Start & Search doesn't seam to work.

Microsoft - it is really really poor practice to remove functionality that people use daily and have come to rely on.

It takes a long time to configure environments so they work for one and it would be nice to see a little more respect for your user base.

I have been a Windows user since version 3.1. It has been a long practice for Microsoft (Apple does it, too) to make usage decisions for us. I am a power user. Most of my Windows friends have never even used File Manager. So, Microsoft makes these changes to cater to the low-end "normal" user instead of the rest of us. It is absolutely a necessity to NOT remove the functionality that more powerful users rely on. Move these features around, but don't get rid of them.

I did leave out one step on my workaround:

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