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

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Have you tried the good old uncheck the box, apply, restart? It probably won't work, mind, but might be worth a try.

(I just tried to open a .wav from My Documents in Notepad to see if it did the same thing, and it didn't, but it came up partially in Japanese. I call that a good experiment.)

Have you found this page yet, which may or may not be helpful?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I did try restarting, yes, and that didn't seem to have much effect. Though if, as someone suggested above, the shaded box only means "some items in this directory are read-only" then I wouldn't expect it to help much.

I should try opening a text file in notebook, actually, to see whether it's Windows being mad, or emacs being bad.

Thanks for the page reference - I'll have a proper read through that (even if it's not directly relevant, it's probably stuff I should know!) sometime when I'm not pretending to be working.