I had a 12Gb file that had been copied to my Vista x64 machine across the
network. UAC was off yet I was still unable to delete or move it, or even
view its properties! Eventually I had to boot into safe mode with command
prompt and use CACLS.exe to give myself permission to delete my own file
from my own PC.

Is this "working as intended"? Its a real PITA!

snip
Is this "working as intended"? Its a real PITA!

Most likely. The way file permissions work hasn't changed at all, although
the concept of integrity has been added, but that doesn't sound like the
problem in this case.

It sounds like the permissions on the file were set such that you did not
have any access to the file. This would make sense if you had modified
default permissions on the file in XP or for some other reason the file did
not grant the administrators and/or users group access to it. Since it was
from another operating system, permissions on it that were granted to any
specific user account would not be recognized in Vista.

In any case, you could have used icacls (the replacement for cacls) from
within Vista while logged in as an administrator, regardless of your UAC
settings (as long as you ran the command prompt "as administrator"), to do
the same thing you did from safe mode.


--
- JB

Windows Vista Support Faq
http://www.jimmah.com/vista/