Vista Favorites Problem and solution

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I know.  You are supposed to spell "Favourites" with a "u" in the middle.  However, I'm going to sway towards convention and use the Americanisation of the English language in this post, for indexing purposes only. 

I'm the kind of guy who likes to keep his operating system and documents partition separate.  If I need to blow away my PC and install a new OS it simplifies the deployment by not having to back up all my documents, music and movies and favorites.

Now that Windows Vista stores favorites under my profile folder, I can move them with all my other documents and files to another partition.  When I first did this, I came across a problem when trying to save new favourites (sorry) favorites in Internet Explorer.  I received an error and I could not proceed with the creation of the nw favorite. 

I came across an explanation (and fix) for this the other day and it looks like that because Internet Explorer is running in protected mode (low privileges) it can't modify or create new files on another partition.  The work around is quite easy to do and will basically allow IE access to your favorites folder so that it may save new items there.

  • Open a command prompt with Admin privileges (right-click Command Prompt and click Run As
    Administrator    )
  • Browse to the folder that contains your favorites folder
  • Type: icacls favorites /setintegritylevel (OI)(CI)low

Hat tip to Jimmy Brush on the Windows Vista Forums.

Technorati tags: Vista, IE, Protected Mode, Favorites