flycaster

Until Vista and its permissions came along, I used to be able to navigate fairly well within my computer. But now I feel like a beginner whenever I get stopped by the dreaded (at least to me) "You need permission to perform this task."

I have an external drive (holds about 100GB) that I have been using to back up files and stuff. However, I want to delete many folders from the EHD and better streamline my backups, and when I try to do so, I get the dreaded... I mean, like I have Adobe on the EHD, why can't I simply delete it. As far as I can tell I am the administrator, so shouldn't I be able to delete stuff from the EHD without all this hassle?

For example, here's what I tried to no avail: I selected Adobe on my EHD, right clicked it and selected Properties>Security. There I see that, among other things, I have "Full Control"...So why can't I now delete this folder. Reading through the inherited stuff (some stuff I want to delete came from XP and I have Vista HP)and permissions is the ultimate confusion exercise. I do want to try to maintain security on the computer (although I and my wife are its only users), so I'm reluctant to undo UAC-which I think will get rid of all these permission walls??? Can anyone please help me before I have the next drink? Thanks.

BTW, I naively thought that if I turned UAC off, then permissions would go away...but Noooo.