Big warning: Because the ‘dark screen of annoyance’ is a security feature, disabling it will leave you a lot more vulnerable to security breaches, like viruses, trojans and other attacks. Do it at your own risk!

my ‘painless’ transtion moving files from an xp laptop to a vista laptop has turned into an ordeal.

Clicking ‘Try Again’ without rectifying the problem is down right silly really! What do you expect to happen exactly? I don’t mean to be rude, but in this case it does sound like the problem is between the keyboard and the chair.”

One has to be very arrogant to write something like this in response to the perfectly reasonable articulation of the problem by the blog author, and in total denial of everyday experience of thousands of frustrated users of Vista. I am one of them, and I am not retarded. Far from it. Instead of addressing what seems to be a crying blunder by Microsoft programmers (offering to the user, in a circular pattern, something that WILL NOT be performed instead of pointing to the source of the problem), the guy points his finger at the victims.

Interesting. So explain this to me. I log into my user account. I open up my Documents folder. I want to do some cleanup. I see a folder in the top level of my Documents folder that really should belong inside another folder, which is also inside the top level of my Documents folder. So I click and drag the first folder onto the second folder and drop it.

Bang – “You’ll need to provide administrator permission to move to this folder”. Before we go any further, can I just ask why? I’m logged into my own account, I’m inside my own Documents folder, and I want to move one folder, that’s already inside my Documents folder because at some point in the past I either created it myself within my Documents folder or moved it there, into another folder which exists because of the same exact actions. No matter what the folder contains (it contains JPEGS), why am I being asked this question at all, when each folder shouldn’t even be able to exist within the Documents folder in the first place if there was a permissions problem.

So I click Continue, and you know the drill: screen goes dark, a second dialog appears saying “Windows needs your permission to continue”, I click “Continue”, the screen un-dims, and a dialog pops up saying “Destination Folder Acess Denied”. Now this is interesting – maybe it’s not the folder I’m trying to move, but the one I’m trying to move it to? That’s what Windows is telling me. The destination folder also contains JPEGS, but I decide to test anyway – I create a quick test file in the top level of my Documents folder, and then drag and drop it into the destination folder. No problems.

So what I’m left with is a dialog that dares me to “Try Again” or Cancel. Vista and I both know that if I try again the same thing will happen, so now I just feel insulted.

What’s really sad about this is that I am a big proponent of UAC. It’s actually a rather ingenious way to solve a lot of problems in not only Windows, but computers in general. And like they di with Active Desktop, Microsoft is going to screw it up and turn the world against because of astoundingly bad implementation.

I really don’t have the time to deal with this. A comparison of the security settings under properties dialog of both folders shows them to be exactly ther same. I logged into my system to clean up my Documents folder in preparation to edit some JPEGS. It’s called using your computer to get something done. But my computer won’t let me. So I have two choices – spend an hour searching online (which is how I came across this page – no Microsoft pages showed up in the results for this error), or leave the folders where Vista has apparently decided IT wants them to be, not where I want them to be.

Nothings open btw – no files are in use – this is a straight-up permissions error on Microsoft’s part. This is what I used to laugh at Mac user’s when OSX first came out. Now I’m the one with egg on my face for upgrading. Thanks Microsoft!

However, many, many other people encountering this situation would have no clue. And instead of informing the user about the actual source of the problem, Windows Vista starts asking for them to give their permission, which has absolutely no effect on resolving the situation.

In fact it leads them in the wrong direction completely!
That is why this is worse behaviour than XP.

And yes, a user with no knowledge of the problem may well click “Try again”, as they are not informed what the real cause of the problem is, and could easily assume it has ‘fixed itself’.

You state that “The only time Vista will ask you to authenticate / provide permission when performing file operations, is if the file / folder is marked as a system file or in a system or root directory”.
But as described in the post, that is clearly not the case. (Unless read/write-locked directories are marked as system files, which would make me wonder why they aren’t marked “read/write-locked” instead).