Changing permissions on a folder that you can't access

Hello,

I am new to the forums but I was searching the forums for an answer to my question and didn't get one so I turned to the rest of the internet. In time I was able to develop a fix for my problem. This is the fix. If this is in the wrong place please tell me and I will gladly move it. My initial problem was that I could not access the folder "WindowsApps" at "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps" even though I was an administrator. Let's not worry about why I needed access to it, that is a whole different story. Anyways, I found that I was supposed to have traverse/list access to the folder by checking the advanced security settings and I was not able to traverse the folder through windows explorer, or any other programs for that matter, and the cause was obvious after I looked past the "Administrators" group policy, the "Users" group policy on it was corrupted. Well since I didn't have permission to write new permissions I was kinda stuck, so that started my hunt, first for the built-in admin account, which was not what I needed, then for a "System" user account, which was apparently not a thing I could access easily. Now that all of those had failed I came across a way to access a System level command prompt, which was able to give me the control I needed to use icacls to create a new policy for the "Users" group and subsequently gave me access to the folder. I had to use a program called PSTools, made by Mark Russinovich, to finally give me the level of access I needed to complete this. I know that this is a lot of info and probably seems useless but all other methods for changing the permissions to fix it failed and instead of doing a long refresh I preferred a faster method.

I hope this helps everyone who needs it. Feel free to comment anything you like or if you feel I should change the post in any way.

Thanks,
Sirius

Interesting, that WindowsApps Folder was created on my Win10 Home computer with the latest update, is empty and also prevents access. On my Win10 Pro computer it was created 2 days ago.

Breton,

It is a new folder from the Windows Store that places the downloaded apps (at least part of them) in there for storage and ease of access for it. As the administrator you should be able to list the folder contents in explorer. You may want to check the advanced security permissions to see if there are any broken permissions. You will have to view each entry to see if they are broken. It will tell you if there is anything broken on the view screens.

Thanks,
Sirius