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.

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

my suggestion?
stop using Windows for Playgroups and switch to 2k, unless you know of a unix variant that will reliably run everything you want (if so, tell me?)

[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?