When I got my Vista Business laptop in spring I had a lot of problems
accessing folders which I'd transferred over from my previous laptop which
was running XP, and I kept getting messages to say I did not have permission
to open the folder (or something like that) even though I am the only user of
the Vista machine (as I was on the XP machine) and I have administrator
rights in Vista.

I'd like to know if my folder structure is like that of other Vista users or
if I've got some irregularities there which are still causing indexing,
search and access issues.

For example, if I click on 'Start' (the Windows logo button or key), then
click the 'Documents' link under [My name ] (at the top of the right-hand
column, in black), Windows Explorer opens and in the address line at the top
it says [My Name] Documents. In the left-hand pane, 'Documents' is
highlighted and in the right-hand pane, sure enough, I can see all the
sub-folders of 'Documents' (i.e. what was 'My Documents' in XP). BUT if I
scroll up to the top of the left-hand pane and click [My Name], in the
right-hand pane I then see a number of folders, but Documents is not one of
them. I know by trial and error that to get to 'Documents' from here, I have
to click on a folder in the right-hand pane called 'Links', then click on a
SHORTCUT to Documents in the Links folder, to get me to the 'Documents'
folder. Is this the same for everyone?

Another possibly related example is that when I use Windows Picture Gallery,
I simply can't add any pictures to the Gallery from 'my' Pictures, I've had
to put them all in the Public Pictures folder to be able to view them using
Gallery. (Using Windows Live Picture Gallery makes no difference). I get a
message saying I don't have permission to access 'my' Pictures folder or that
it's a system folder.

I'm obviously not understanding something, so I'd be grateful for help or
pointers to more reading.