28303 - Win 2000: Possible permissions problem with Users directory

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 6464

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: BackEnd, defect, P3)

Description

[Sean Richardson]

Filing this entirely speculatively...I have no access to Win2000 myself.
It seems that Win2000 does not give users by default write access to any
"Program Files\Netscape\Communicator\Users" directory, and without it,
NN 4.x fails to work. Presumably the same would apply to all "Program Files" 
subdirectories, including any created for Mozilla, with the presumed rationale 
that users have no business writing files in directories where executables
reside.

Quoting from the Febrauary 22, 2000 issue of the American edition of PC Mag,
page 126:
  >Default rights for users in Windows 2000 are more restrictive than in 
  >Windows NT 4. For example, we found that if a user does not have write 
  >access to the Program Files\Netscape\Communicator\Users folder, Netscape
  >Communicator will fail, because it needs to write its profile information
  >there. You can address problems like this by making users members of more
  >powerful groups or by micromanaging rights as necessary. Using applications
  >that comply with the Windows 2000 Application Specification also solves
  >this problem.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/resources/news/appspecnews.asp
for the PR hoopla on the latter and
http://msdn.microsoft.com/certification/appspec.asp 
for the spec itself.

Of course, implementing it would mean fitting into the Microsoft way
of storing and using user-specific info, which almost certainly would mean
that there could not be a central Users directory for all Mozilla profiles, 
but if this is as much a problem as it sounds, release-noting this as
"you must have permission to write to the ..." would be a suboptimal move.

The only non-Microsoft-specific way I can think of to handle this would be
to create each subdirectory for each user under the "Users" folder with that
user's own permissions in the first place, and create the "Users" folder
at install time with permissions that allow *that*.

Comment 1

[selmer (gone)]

Speculation should not form the basis of a bug.  Questions can be asked in the
newsgroups, use n.p.m.prefs for profile related stuff.

This bug is a another case of the general bug 6464.  Closing dup.



*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 6464 ***

Comment 2

[Grace Bush]

.