A year ago I decided to try the delights of developing as a non-admin. It’s been great, I didn’t regret it.
My machine has been showing the symptoms of software rot. Yesterday evening I repaved my machine. I organize my disk as a partition for the O/S plus software and a separate partition for data. I did a total ground-zero reinstall of the O/S (Win XP Pro), on a freshly formatted partition. One effect of that is that my new account has a new SID. All the old files on my data partition allow me to read them – I’m a User, but they don’t let me delete/write/update because my new SID is different to the one they were created with.
I think I am going to have to live with manually changing file permission settings for many months to come – I’d be *very* interested to hear of any cute shortcuts to that process. More important – I’m expecting to have to re-pave again, annually seems about normal for me. What I'd really like is some ideas on what I can do to stop this problem next time?