> If you are seeing "Administrator" as the owner, then at some time previously, a user
> has enabled the Global Administrator account and secured the ownership under that .
Actually I had misstyped that. It really said "Administrators". But no matter that ... it looks like this could still be some kind of global administrator account and it was indeed disabled. I re-enabled it using "lusrmgr.msc" and then I selected that account via "switch user". At that point, I did regain access to my files ... even the files that I had already changed the ownership from Administrators to my own login name (also and admin account). This is no good however since all my user settings are gone since they are associated with my login and not this global administrator account. I tried logging back into my own account, and tried the procedure again of switching the owner of a file from "Administrators" to my own account. I was hoping the only reason this didn't work last time was that it didn't allow the change because the "from" account was disabled. No luck however ... as before it still reports that the ownership was transfered, and yet it refuses to open the file.
So how to proceed? I suppose I could copy all my user settings into the global admin account (although I don't actually know how to do that), and then I could just use that one (and abandon my old account). Admitting that my old user account is permanently broken sounds a bit severe.
I'm wondering though ... since it is possible to copy these files to another computer and open it from there, it seems that windows has must somehow be stripping off this ownership data so the new computer can access it. If so, isn't it conceivable that Windows has a way of doing a similar copy to a different place on the same computer, somehow turning it into a raw DOS file that any user can access? Then I could just delete the originals, and copy the new files back to where they belong. Probably there is a reason this won't work or you would have suggested it already, but I'm just reaching for a way to get the computer working again.
Its amazing that microsoft thought that it was necessary for the permissions of a file to have this level of complexity. Equally amazing that they thought that something so complex would actually work.
Thanks for your reply, and thanks in advance if you or anyone else can offer further suggestions.
~Paul