Same Problem Here - Possible Workaround
Gang,
I purchased a new Windows 7 machine and received it late last week. Started copying files over my home network from my old XP to the new machine. Things went well overall, except for half of the PDF files on my system. Most of these were self-generated ... printing web pages (receipts, confirmations, etc) to PDF files. However, I did not see a pattern. While some files went over w/out issue, others did the "You need permission from the adminstrator to modify this file". Odd, since I was copying and not modifying.
I googled and asked around. I found this thread and others. I tried taking ownership of directories The Hard Way. I found that REG script that adds "take ownership" to the explorer context menu. None of this worked.
Via simple experimentation, I found that if I would SHARE the XP source directory containing the PDF files, the directory would copy over intact and with no errors. I did this for 3 large, previously problematic directories and they copied flawlessly.
NOTE that most of these directories were sub-dirs of an already shared "high level" directory. That didn't seem to matter. Perhaps if I would have re-shared the top dir and propogated all of the new settings down it would have also worked. However, I DO know that sharing the lower level directories fixed ths issue for me. One of these directories was partitioned in yearly sub-dirs, and sharing the parent directory allowed all the lower level context to be copied fine. Again, the SHARING was done on the source, XP, machine.
I'm not sure why only PDF files were a problem for me, but I now have all of my files copied over. One more pass through the old XP machine and I believe it will be ready for decommissioning, or perhaps reassignment.
Hope that helps!
Nick