How I fixed "Access Denied" on Vista

[DavidA]

I installed Vista for the first time last week. In general I was happy with it, but certain torrents gave me "Access Denied" in utorrent.

In the FAQ it explains that a common problem is when other programs are in the process of indexing the file. In my case though, after a few hours I found out that it was actually a problem with permissions.

I had installed Vista on my C drive, but left my old D drive as it was. It was filled with downloads from utorrent in XP. It turned out that Vista didn't like resuming a download that XP had started. I found that if I run utorrent as Administrator (right-click on utorrent | Run As Administrator) then it could resume the files fine. In the end I worked out that if I simply copied the files to another directory and then deleted the old ones, then Vista considered the new files to be mine and utorrent could update them without any problem.

So... if you see "Access Denied" after a fresh Vista install, try running utorrent as administrator. If that works okay then you have a permission problem and copying the files to a new location might solve your problem.

[moogly]

I think it's not specific to uT but to Windows. I remember I saw the same problem to move files after a reinstall of XP, because there is a difference between Owner Rights & Admin Rights.

[Firon]

You can just take control of the files by going to the properties and security settings for the folders in Explorer.

[BearRug]

---In the end I worked out that if I simply copied the files to another directory and then deleted the old ones, then Vista considered the new files to be mine and utorrent could update them without any problem.---thank you DavidA!

This posting just made my day a lot better. After over-drafting the checking account to replace my old XP system with an upgraged unit with Vista, my uTorrent wouldn't stay up and running. After copying my old files to a new directory and changing my directories settings in uTorrent to point to the new location everything is working great.

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UPDATE

well... it didn't last. I logged off for a while and the access denied message came back when i fired up uTorrent again. This time -- after trying to change all the permissions and taking possession of all the files, both downloads and torrents -- I simply removed the torrents from the uTorrent app's que and searched out all the same torrents again on sites where I had originally found them. I downloaded the torrents again into the same folder where the others were and replaced them with fresh torrents downloaded using my new system and new OS. As they came in I loaded them into uTorrent again. And so far they are looking good. I even am getting a 400+ Kb download rate on one. If I don't follow up with another post, you know it worked.

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