Apps have weird behavior without admin rights

Hackentosher · November 20, 2022

So a while ago my laptop had an encounter with water while powered off. Before powering on, I removed the SSD and copied its contents to an external drive to be safe. I was able to dry the laptop well enough and it booted and worked fine, but ever since that incident many programs have weird behaviors. Some of them wont run at all unless given admin rights, some have limited functionality without admin rights. For example, my terminal program MobaXterm can't open any new sessions beyond favorited sessions, or KiCAD can't find my custom part libraries without admin rights. Updating/reinstalling these programs has not fixed the issue, the only thing I can think to do is reformat and reinstall windows, but I would like to avoid that if I can.

Has anyone ever seen this kind of behavior before and found a fix for it?

GoodBytes · November 22, 2022

Simple. You copied data from NTFS drive to another NTFS drive, and now you are on a new install of Windows.

All to say, the file permissions have been carried over but the SID's don't exist in the new installation.

Programs should be reinstalled, not transferred, and data should be cleared of their permissions if you are doing this (well, set permissions to: Everyone)

Hackentosher · November 29, 2022

On 11/21/2022 at 10:29 PM, GoodBytes said:

Simple. You copied data from NTFS drive to another NTFS drive, and now you are on a new install of Windows.

All to say, the file permissions have been carried over but the SID's don't exist in the new installation.

I'm not on a new copy of Windows, I copied the contents of my boot disk to an external drive as a backup, placed the boot disk back in my laptop, and re-powered on. My hunch is somewhere in that process some config file(s) got moved or deleted that borked permissions across the install. It's probably not worth it to track down the specific issue over nuking this install.

I'm not familiar with SIDs, are those configurations I can fix?

On 11/21/2022 at 10:29 PM, GoodBytes said:

Programs should be reinstalled, not transferred, and data should be cleared of their permissions if you are doing this (well, set permissions to: Everyone)

I've tried reinstalling a couple of programs, but this has had inconsistent effects. MobaXterm showed no change after a reinstall, but I remember Chrome and some others being buggy after the water incident until I reinstalled.