Reasons to be miserable give my brain a pain

[venta]

A secon technical appeal. Apologies to those who don't give a toss about these things.

(I've tried a very brief google on this, but to no avail. I'm just asking in case anyone knows off-hand, otherwise I'll go back to ransacking the dustier corners of the web.)

Yetersday, I tried to open a non-existent file in emacs. This isn't usually a problem, it creates the file, and away you go (so long as the directory it's in exists).

However, I got an error message telling me that the directory ("My Documents") was read-only. Strange, I thought. My Documents, Properties, well so it was. Uncheck the box, apply, save, try again.

Nope, still read-only. My Documents, Properties, yup, it's read-only again.

How can I ask Windows XP to actually believe me that yes, I'd really like to create documents in that folder from time to time ? (I can create documents by clicking in the directory, and saying New -> Text document.) I'm fairly sure Windows XP let me create documents by opening them in emacs pre-Service Pack 2. Win 2K doesn't seem to have a problem with me doing it, either.

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

You're bringing up the properties pane, and under Attributes, it has "Read Only: <shaded square>" or "Read Only: <tick>"?

The shaded square means that some of the contents are read only, and the tick means that the folder iteslf is read only. (I don't know what happens if the folder is read-only, but the contents are writable).

Which doesn't explain why emacs is complaining, but it's the simplest explanation for the icon not changing.

[venta.livejournal.com]

It's a shaded square, so that'd explain that, yes.

I guess it's come security feature to stop me from opening files with anything so seditious and unreliable as GNU software :(

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Oh, to add further clarification:
if I open up the properties pane for my own "My Documents", I get the shaded square.

If I navigate to the parent folder in emacs
( C-x f C:/Documents and Settings/p0023009 )
then I get to view a "unix style" directory listing, which includes

  dr-xr-xr-x   2 p0023009 root        0 Feb 25 11:41 My Documents

So my emacs seems to think it's read only too! But it does still let me write to it...
Confused now!

[venta.livejournal.com]

At work (on Win 2K) I get:

drwxrwxrwx 2 wootten 0 0 Feb 25 11:48 My Documents

The box in the properties pane for "My Documents" is an unticked ticky-box.

And it does let me open files.

So that's all OK. It's just XP that's barking.

Incidentally, for strict accuracy I'm using XEmacs, not emacs.