Well I turned UAC back on and found it makes the perms all revert to as would be "normal" on an XP system for the legacy user profile directories under "c:\documents and settings\", local admins w/ full control. So I clobbered the permissions there despite the protesting of Vista, set them to not inherit from above and set local adimns with full control from that point on down, then turned off the insipid UAC and rebooted. Now the perms look "normal" for the legacy "documents and settings" directory tree with UAC off, but no access. It looks like some kind of fake pointer only, as the silly icon shown for it browsing the c: drive in the GUI looks like a shortcut. Probably some foolishness to "improve my experience". Junk that would not install before like Adobe still would not install.
I'll thankfully probably not have time to get back and work with this malformed OS this week. Best of luck to anyone who tries.
mole
_________________________
mole
Who is John Galt?