Hi there,

I am experiencing the symptoms described by this KB article on my new Vista Ultimate 32 bit implementation.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297760

Of course the article above is not for Vista (at this stage) and I'm not aware of a Microsoft patch for Vista for this issue.

I suspect the problem is permissions related as the message "The Recycle Bin on drive letter:\ is corrupt or invalid. Do you want to empty the Recycle Bin for this drive?" only appears for non-administrative users. The message only occurs if an administrative user has previously used the recycle bin (delete file, empty bin). e.g. Normal user logs on -> no error message, normal user logs off, admin user logs on, admin user deletes file, admin user empties recycle bin, admin user logs off, normal user logs on -> error message as per above. This occurs for every drive an admin user uses the recycle bin on and then a normal user subsequently accesses. If the normal user is promoted to admin rights the error messages do not appear.

The normal user can not empty the recycle bin when promoted with the above error as they do not have permission to do so and UAC kicks in requiring admin access.

There may not be a "fix" but I'd accept a workaround at this stage if one was available and viable, perhaps a "permissions" based hack. I could try to give "Authenticated Users" full control of the Recycle Bin but I suspect Windows tries to manage Recycle Bin permissions by itself, certainly any changes to Recycle Bin properties will reset permissions.

Interestingly the symptoms only appear to have occurred after I enable the Guest account. This may be a Red Herring but could also point to a permissions related issue as Guest permissions are a complex beast. Subsequently disabling the Guest account did not resolve the problem.

My analysis concludes and confirms that this is a bug with Vista, one that expresses identical symptoms to the original issue in XP so I suspect regression. However I can't find any information on this issue with Vista or even a similar case - in my mind however it is implausible that identical symptoms (XP/Vista) are not the result of a similar root cause.

Any ideas?

Well I don't know -- but see if there is anything funky about the permissions configuration.

Unhide the protected system files, and right click on and select Properties for $Recycle.bin

Select the Security tab. You will see that System and Administrative users have full control over all procedures. While "Users" have "special" persions. I've included the default settings for mine in this screenshot. You can compare them with what you see under yours.

Thanks for the reply Mod.

Yes, this approach temporarily addresses the symptoms. However, if I follow the procedure above after doing this (normal user logs on -> no error message, normal user logs off, admin user logs on, admin user deletes file, admin user empties recycle bin, admin user logs off, normal user logs on) the situation reoccurs.

This is to say that something is persistently corrupting the recycle bin (or throwing up an erroneous message).

I'm open to suggestions, this is annoying for all normal users who not only get the error but can't use the recycle bin.

Try this:

In Tools > Folder Options > View -- temporarily UNcheck Hide Protected Operating System Files.

Then on the Explorer C: (root) drive find the folder $Recycle.bin

If you don't see it, close and reopen Explorer.

Right click on that and delete it. You may get some message about its being corrupt or warnings about .ini files.

The bin should temporarily disappear from the folder tree. Delete a file and it should reappear again.

At this point you can recheck the "hide protected operating system files" option in View.