SOLVED: You Must Have Read Permission To View The Properties Of This Object – Even Administrators

It is not clear to even most experienced administrators why they might see the error message:

• “You must have read permission to view the properties of this object” or
• “You don’t currently have permission to access this folder”

even when they are administrators on the local machine or domain administrators which have FULL CONTROL specified in the NTFS security tab.

The reason is because the folder in question is missing a critical permission that allows the system to interrogate the access control list (ACL).

There are several work around and one solution. You could:

1. Disable User Access Control (ACL)
2. Manage the permissions from a different computer
   • This is because UAC will not kick in when you are connecting remotely
3. Add yourself to the Access Control List, via the SECURITY tab of the folder Properties dialog box,
4. Click the CONTINUE button on the YOU DON’T CURRENTLY HAVE PERMISSION prompt
   
   These four will work around the problem but the fix is to:
   
5. Add INTERACTIVE with READ and LIST permissions to ACL of the folder
   • in the screenshot below we have “read and execute” enabled as well but you do not need to have that