Windows 7: Eliminating "This Folder Is Shared With Other People" Message

I had installed Windows 7.  Now, when I would try to move or delete some folders, I would get this message:

This folder is shared with other people.

If you move this folder, it will no longer be shared.

That message was correct:  I had, in fact, shared the parent folder (and all of its subfolders, including this one) with my other computer.  And I wanted existing and newly created subfolders to continue to be shared.  I just didn't want to receive this warning.

I tried the approach of going into Control Panel > HomeGroup > Leave the homegroup, because someone advised that this was the solution.  It wasn't.  I tried a search.  This led to a thread with some heartwarming rants about what a dumbass feature this was.  That thread also contained the suggestion that, at least for purposes of deleting (as distinct from moving) folders, a workaround was to cut and paste files and folders into Recycle Bin, rather than trying to delete them directly.  There was also a command line alternative that supposedly worked for wiping out lots of subfolders:

for /D %d in (*) do rmdir /S /Q "%d"

My guess was that the command line would also work for moving, in a pinch:  type MOVE /? for guidance.  But I didn't want a command-line solution.  The thread also offered a couple of other complicated workarounds with potential side effects.  Before going that route, I tried the suggestion to take ownership of the folder in question.  I had already added a Take Ownership context menu (i.e., right-click) option in Windows Explorer, so I used that now.  I used it at the level of the entire partition.  That didn't solve the problem.  I tried it again on the top-level folder.  That didn't do it either.  I verified that I had already given Full Control to Everyone in the Sharing context menu option, so that wasn't the solution either.

Another thread contained messages repeating the view that, as a deliberate feature of Windows, this couldn't be changed.  I took a look in TweakNow PowerPack 2012, in case they had a fix.  I hadn't really used TweakNow previously, but now I saw it wasn't really a tweaker in the sense that Ultimate Windows Tweaker (UWT) was.  So I ran UWT instead.  But no, UWT didn't seem to have a solution either.  So far, the only solution I had seen was that some people had repartitioned their drive and reinstalled Windows from scratch.  But that was a pretty draconian solution, and it didn't seem to guarantee against a recurrence of the problem.

Back in Windows Explorer, I right-clicked on the drive being shared and selected Properties > Security tab > Edit > Add > Everyone > Check Names > OK > Allow Full Control > OK.  That took a while, as it went through the drive, with a message that said, "Setting security information" various files and folders.  This was obviously not a very secure solution.  Nor was it logically related to sharing.  It was just a guess.

In another thread, someone said that they noticed this behavior began when they installed RC-1 (i.e., Windows 7, First Release Candidate).  As noted above, people had been saying it was a built-in Windows feature.  But there was at least the possibility that some program had triggered it.  In that spirit, someone else in that same thread offered the belief that it might be related to Windows Mail.  That was a possibility.  I had installed Windows Live Mail.  I didn't like it much -- it was very slow to start.  But I had already uninstalled it.  There didn't seem to be much more I could do on that front.  I tried running Glary Registry Cleaner, just in case that would make a difference.  It identified a lot of problems, but did not fix this particular one.  In another thread, someone suggested that the culprit might be the network sharing service in Media Player 11.

I saw recurrent references to the C:\Users\[username]\Appdata\Local\Temp\WPDNSE folder.  For username Ray, mine had nothing in it.  Evidently they came to that folder because its name was appearing in an error message.  I wasn't getting that.  The general idea seemed to be that one user might somehow be linked to another user at that folder.  That was interesting.  I looked into the possibility that this "shared folder" problem might be due to the existence of an unnecessary user account.  As described in another post, I pruned out some extraneous user accounts.  But that did not resolve this problem.

Over time, the problem appeared less frequently.  It seemed that there might have been an ownership or sharing event, occurring at one time, that became less relevant as my folders went through various processes of being renamed, moved, reshared, and so forth.  One post gave me the idea that the problem might be in Windows Explorer > select a folder > right-click > Properties > Sharing tab > Advanced Sharing > Permissions.  At this moment, the only group or user listed there was Everyone.  It seemed that, previously, there might have been additional entries there, for Ray, Administrators, and/or System.  The post made me think that, even though all roads seemed like they should lead to Mecca, the mere presence of multiple people here would confuse Windows.  Maybe the original warning that "This folder is shared with other people" was Windows' way of telling me that it was going to remove the others and leave only Everyone on the list.  I didn't test this; this was just an idea from that post.  At the time when I decided to close this post, it's not so much that the problem had disappeared as that it had become more rare.

Windows 7: Deleting Excess "User" Accounts

One day, while wandering through the forest of drive C, I came upon C:\Users, where I beheld more users than I had anticipated. We had Administrator, All Users, Default, Default User, Public, Ray, and Ray Woodcock.  Who were all these people?  And did I want to be associated with them?

Most of these weren't listed in Control Panel > User Accounts > Manage another account.  There, I saw only Ray and Guest.  (I had set myself to be Administrator.)  Guest wasn't listed in C:\Users, so there seemed to be some slippage here. Maybe Guest didn't actually exist yet; the button was there just so I could add a guest account when needed.  So were all these Users in C:\Users real?  Could I delete any of them?

This appeared not to be exactly the same as deleting an account that would appear in User Accounts.  Here in C:\Users, I was dealing with folders that looked like they were tied in with other things.  In other words, it seemed that it could be a bad idea to delete the wrong account.  I ran a search, seeking guidance, but even Microsoft seemed pretty blasé about the prospect:  "If you have a user account on your computer that is not being used, you can permanently remove it by deleting it."  Period.  Just do it.  There were different steps, they said, according to whether the computer was on a workgroup or a domain.  Their procedure for making that determination was (in my translation) to go to Start > Run > SystemPropertiesAdvanced.exe > Computer Name tab.  (Soon, I would run into stories of grief from those who had actually proceeded to wipe out their C:\Users subfolders willy-nilly.)

Back in C:\Users, I went into the Administrator folder.  The only thing there was a subfolder called Application Data\ImgBurn\Log Files.  Well.  Could I set ImgBurn to put its log files somewhere else?  It seemed I could.  The relevant settings were in ImgBurn > Tools > Settings > File Locations tab.  There were actually four different folders that I needed to create elsewhere, in order to completely eliminate ImgBurn's need for C:\Users\Administrator.  I saved the ImgBurn Settings.ini file so that I wouldn't have to do this again after some future installation.  Then I deleted that folder.

Next, I went into C:\Users\Ray Woodcock.  This one had evidently been created by Microsoft Office, for the use of Outlook.  But I wasn't using Outlook.  So I just deleted C:\Users\Ray Woodcock.

The list was getting shorter, but now the sledding was tougher.  I wasn't going to delete the Ray account.  Two of the four others -- All Users and Default User -- had padlock icons, suggesting that Windows would rather keep them.  All four also had lots of subfolders.  It appeared they might not meet the Microsoft qualification:  IF the account is not being used.  These accounts were not being used by me, directly.  But it appeared that someone was using them.

I tried a search for the Public account.  I ran pretty quickly into advice not to delete that folder, and a cry for help from someone who had done so.  End of story on that.

Well, how about the (padlocked) All Users folder?  For that, a search yielded the information that C:\Users\All Users was just a symbolic link to C:\ProgramData.  I attempted to check this.  Yes, both folders did seem to contain the same subfolders, apparently used by a variety of programs:  Adobe, Apple, Skype, etc.  The status bar at the bottom of Windows Explorer said there were 26 items in each.  It seemed that the All Users folder was there for backward compatibility with programs that would look for it instead of for C:\ProgramData.  In short, I could make things difficult by deleting it, and it seemed that deleting it wouldn't actually have anything to do with any real accounts.

This left me with the Default and Default User folders in C:\Users.  I didn't understand the difference between these two, so I ran a search.  MrBruce1959 said that Default was a system folder, not to be toyed with, whereas Default User was supposed to be the initial or default account for the person who would be using the computer.  In that case, I didn't understand why Windows created a separate Ray account (my choice of name, their choice of folder) instead of renaming Default User to be Ray when I was first setting up the system.  Why leave a superfluous Default User folder after the real default user has made an appearance? 

I tried a different search.  Someone passed along the rumor that I could just go ahead and delete the Default User folder.  Another post spoke blithely of deleting the Default User folder (actually, they said "profile," not folder) with a script, so as to replace it with a preconfigured Default User replacement.  That one was followed (at the bottom of the Experts Exchange page) with an extended discussion of programming technique, so apparently it was OK in principle to delete the folder, at least if a look-alike then took its place.  A post in another thread said that Default User was the one from which other user profiles were built.  I didn't plan on letting anyone else into my world, so I felt I could do without it for that purpose.

I decided to zip the Default User folder, delete it, and save the ZIP for future reference.  Before doing this, I made a System Restore backup (Start > Run > SystemPropertiesProtection.exe).  Also, since System Restore had been flaky sometimes in the past, I made an Acronis drive image.  I gave this some time, to see whether it would have adverse effects.  A couple of days later, the system seemed to be running OK.  The removal of the Default User folder did not seem to have any immediate or obvious negative effects.

Windows 7: The INSTALL Partition

For a long time, probably since the 1980s, I had kept my Windows installation on drive C and my data on drive D.  (Drives, or partitions of drives, can be readily created within Windows 7 and also by partition manager programs.  GParted, included in the downloadable Ubuntu CD, has been the most reliable partitioning programs for my purposes in recent years.)

Having the data on drive D had several advantages.  One was that I could back up drives C and D on different schedules.  Once I got a good Windows installation set up on drive C, I didn't need to back it up very often.  I'd just make a drive image (using Acronis True Image in the past few years), and I'd make an updated image backup just when I had done some significant new program installation or adjustment.  By contrast, I would want to back up my data on drive D on at least a daily basis.  Of course, when I made the image of drive C, I would need someplace to put it other than drive C.  An external drive was a possibility, assuming the bootable CD would recognize it, but it would tend to be slower, and this would be complete downtime, when it would not be possible to do other work.  It worked the other way, too:  having the data on a separate partition meant that I could completely reinstall Windows without affecting or even worrying about my data.

There were exceptions to that last statement.  Some program configurations were so detailed, time-consuming, and/or oft-changing as to constitute a sort of data.  Not the kind of data I was supposed to be working on, but data nonetheless.  An example:  Firefox add-ons.  It could take a half-hour or more to find, install, and configure my Firefox add-ons after doing a new Windows installation.  Some add-ons allowed me to export my saved settings, but obviously I would not want to store those on drive C; they'd be wiped out if I reinstalled Windows sometime down the line.

I also found it was handy to keep a local copy of the programs that I would install in Windows, after installing the Windows operating system itself.  I did not want to have to re-download all those programs and re-invent all of the things I had previously figured out about installing them.  So instead I had folders containing the programs to install, with installation notes in accompanying text files, and I named the folders in such a way as to guide me in the installation sequence that worked best (e.g., "01 Motherboard Drivers").  There were also quite a few program installers that I tried and uninstalled, or hadn't gotten around to installing.  Also, some ISOs -- ready-to-burn CD images that I had downloaded but hadn't burned to CD, or wanted to keep because it was a hassle to re-download a 700MB image.  I had collected these sorts of things, not only for Windows, but also for Ubuntu.

I accumulated about 75GB of this stuff.  Keeping it all on drive D meant that my daily data backups were swelling up with all this material that didn't need to be backed up every day.  So at some point I moved a bunch of it over to its own partition, with occasional backups.  What I kept on drive D was mostly stuff that I was actually using in my current installation.  One example:  those Firefox settings files.

Sometime in the late 1990s, I discovered that I could move my Start Menu to drive D.  This would have the advantages mentioned above, including especially the fact that my custom-arranged Start Menu (top-level folders:  Productivity, Online, Multimedia, Tools, Startup, Miscellany) would not have to be rearranged each time I installed Windows.  As long as I installed everything in its default installation location, the shortcuts in the Start Menu would come back to life as soon as I reinstalled the target program where the shortcut expected to find it.

A few months before writing this post, I came to realize that, of course, I could also install my portable applications in the Start Menu.  This would be ungainly in the sense that a bottom-level folder in the Start Menu might contain a slew of program files instead of a nice, orderly collection of shortcuts.  But it was handy for keeping everything that ran in one place, where I could copy it to a jump drive and use considerable parts of it on any other Windows machine.  The Start Menu, wherever located, could also be accessed and synchronized on a network, so that I only needed to configure the Start Menu once and would then have it available for any computer I would attach to my home network.  (Making it available did require a registry tweak.)

Putting the portable applications in the Start Menu had an unwanted side effect.  Many portable apps (especially those coordinated by PortableApps.com) used many of the same program files.  That was a problem because I liked to use DoubleKiller to delete duplicate files on drive D.  I couldn't do that anymore, at this point, because it would detect tons of duplicative portable program files that were supposed to be there.  I looked for a different duplicate remover, one that would allow me to exclude folders like the Start Menu folder, but ultimately decided to stay with DoubleKiller for now.  The reason was that I did not want to risk that, one fine day, I would forget to exclude the Start Menu from a DoubleKiller sweep, and (although this was unlikely) would punch the wrong button and delete that Start Menu from my hard drive.

What I decided to do, instead, was to move the Start Menu so that it would join those other program files -- programs to be installed, etc. -- in their own partition.  I called it INSTALL and gave it a letter of W, so that its location would not be affected by the connecting and disconnecting of various USB drives and whatnot.  So then hopefully the shortcuts in it would stay in place, and would require no further adjustment forever and ever.

Right now, unfortunately, they did require adjustment.  I modified the registry tweak to point toward drive W:\Start Menu rather than D:\Installation\Start Menu.  This caused almost no problems.  The main issue was just that a bunch of shortcuts were now dysfunctional, in that they pointed at executable files on D that were now on W.  I ran Glary Registry Repair 3.3.  It identified 165 new registry errors.  As I scrolled down the list, I noticed that a huge number of the problems identified by Glary were links to IrfanView on D.  I considered doing a global registry search and replace for the IrfanView location -- or, indeed, for all references, changing them from D to W, perhaps with the aid of a global registry search-and-replace tool like Registry Toolkit ($25) or Registry Replacer ($15) or Replace Registry Values (free).  But then I decided it might be safer to let Glary fix those dud links and then do a search in a registry editor for any remaining references to D:\Installation|Start Menu.  I used O&O RegEditor to do that search.  I was now down to a total of just 29 registry references to D:\Installation\Start Menu.  I was going to edit them in O&O, but then decided not to.  As long as they weren't hurting me, I was better off just leaving them alone.  One ill-advised registry edit could cost me an hour or more for recover or restoration.

So this was pretty much the end of the project, aside from some continuing cleanup, correction of shortcuts, etc.  I now had an INSTALL partition, labeled as drive W, containing my customized, shared Start Menu and installers for various programs.  I could now run DoubleKiller on drive D without worrying that it might knock out program files, and without having to do manual exclusions to focus it on the data duplicates that I was seeking.