On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 21:16:00 -0800, Gary McCready Gary

Hello: I set up my computer with account name "Cyndi", and then changed it
to "Gary"

The C:/Users/Cyndi Folder did not get renamed.

It won't, no.

I have tried to rename this folder ...

You're about to dig a large hole that won't be fun to climb out of -
this road leads to duplicate account stores, mangled names such as
Cyndi.^%4765, user accounts that don't load, etc. BT,DT in XP :-)

If you understand the background to this, it may be easier to accept.


When a user account is created, a unique identifier is assigned to it
that can never be changed. At the time the account is created, the
account subtree name is bound to that ID.


When you change the name of an existing account via Control Panel,
Users, you map a new name to the same invariant ID. But by now, many
applications will have cast their own data paths in stone, using the
existing user account subtree name, so that cannot be renamed.

So what you see is the new name when looking at the namespace level of
abstraction - Control Panel, Users, or the Welcome screen, or other
login contexts, and the general desktop UI - but when you drop to the
raw file system, you see the old user name embedded in the account's
storage path. If you drop down further, you don't see user names at
all, only the raw ID that was assigned when the account was made.


If you create an account with the same user name, as can happen in XP
but may be prudently blocked in Vista, the reverse happens. You have
what appears to be the same name, but a different unique ID is
spawned, and a new account subtree is spawned that is bound to it.

Normally, this subtree is named to match the user name that was chosen
when the account was created, but if that name already exists at the
file system level, a variant has to be used; usually that means some
gibberish is appended after a . in the name.


Crude attempts to bang these things together, e.g. renaming file
system directories in an attempt to get account A to work with account
B's data set, can be exopected to fail - if the OS's user security is
doing its thing. You can see why that would be necessary.



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Saws are too hard to use.
Be easier to use!
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