Andrew Pilley - Mycronite Networks

Okay, Given that I was a firefox user for a long time (and may well be again when FF3.0 comes out), I've grown used to using a toolbar for my commonly used bookmarks.

I toss folders into the toolbar, and links into the folders, and occasionally, folders into the folders, for several levels of quickly accessible bookmarks for the more commonly used stuff.

This was working fine, until i rebuilt my laptop. I backed up my Links to a network share, and when I restored them, I started getting an entirely unhelpful "Access is Denied" error when attempting to drag a link into them. However, I could still drag a link to the desktop, and then from there, use explorer to copy it into my favorites. Weird.

So I dug into it a bit further, and learned some fun facts about IE7 on Vista. IE7 uses "Protected mode", which is basically a dumbed down way of saying it's running in low mandatory access mode, and only has write access to folders with the Low Mandatory Level label.

This can be easily seen with 'icacls':
c:\Users\user\Favorites>icacls Links
Links XXXXX/user :(I)(F)
XXXXX/user :(I)(OI)(CI)(IO)(F)
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(I)(F)
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(I)(OI)(CI)(IO)(F)
BUILTIN\Administrators:(I)(F)
BUILTIN\Administrators:(I)(OI)(CI)(IO)(F)
Mandatory Label\Low Mandatory Level:(I)(OI)(CI)(NW)

Successfully processed 1 files; Failed processing 0 files

However, because i'd restored the backup of the contents of Links, the Low Mandatory Level had been lost in subdirectories of this, and the last line was missing. Apparently, even though there's inheritance involved, this was bypassed when I copied the files back.

A tool called CHML helped out here tho, and was able to restore the mandatory level required.