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I'm on a fresh install of Windows Server 2016 Standard. My account is a domain / active directory account.

I've got a problem, and have had it for a while, in which I'm unable to access certain Windows directories. Usually it happens when trying to access them via some application, like 7-Zip or Visual Studio. So, it may have something to do with child processes trying to access folders, or something - I'm not sure. The errors I get are usually all some form of an access denied, or not enough permissions, etc. This error happens all over - My Document, Desktop, root C:/ directory, etc. Like, right now I'm trying to run a node.js command-line script that installs some dependencies into a directory under My Documents - I'm unable to because it fails with access denied when trying to perform a directory scan.

Now, even though some things seem to fail with access denied, I'm still capable of installing software. I was able to install Visual Studio, and many other things, without a problem.

I'm pretty sure there is some sort of domain permissions or something that my account lacks in order to have complete access to at least My Documents in certain capacities. As I also mentioned, I've seen it also say I don't have access to other areas such as root C:/ etc, which would be more understandable.

Any ideas or things I can do to check my account's access or permissions on this machine before I go to my co-worker with this pretty broad and generic description of my issue?

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    Take it from an IT person, don't try to figure anything out about it for yourself. Just tell the IT person your symptoms and what you need to be different and let them fix it. Nothing is more frustrating to an IT person than someone who has "done a lot of research" on the issue and wants to tell you all the troubleshooting steps they've gone through (hopefully none of which have made the problem worse) instead of just telling you what's not working so you can fix it quickly and close the ticket and everyone is happy.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Nov 1, 2017 at 1:03
  • This isn’t a “pretty broad and generic description.” This is a basic access issue that can probably be resolved in a few minutes by any IT person worth one’s salt. I would suspect UAC like the other answer. But regardless this is not an unusual issue that is hard to diagnose.
    – Appleoddity
    Nov 1, 2017 at 2:51

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This sounds like UAC. Have you tried to right click "run as admin"? As a developer building internal tools I always disable UAC on my dev machines.

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  • IMO, unless the tool one is writing is related to security, one should configure your workstation securely and write the software to work in that environment. Help keep your users safe.
    – uSlackr
    Nov 1, 2017 at 13:22
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    @uSlackr I dont disagree if the application is targeted to users. From the sounds of it, he's writing applications that crawls server file directories. In this case, disabling UAC is OK. With file servers, I always disable UAC. If UAC is disabled on a dev machine, and the application is targeted to users, then user testing will show if there is a problem.
    – Linuxx
    Nov 1, 2017 at 14:31

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