I use Win10 pro on my personal desktop (eg not part of a domain) and recently started to get weird issues that I cannot open device manager, cannot edit environment variables, or group policy and many others. I don't recall that I did anything weird in my system, the only "unusual" change I made is added myself to "Create symbolic links" permissions in group policies:
Run secpol.msc. In the Local Policies, go to Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignment. In the list, find the Create symbolic links item. Add my own account to the list:
In all cases I get error message box with this message:
Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permission to access the item.
That's what I get for device manager:
"Edit group policy":
If I try to edit environment variables:
There is a relevant article on msdn, but when I tried to check if my user is part of Administrator group I got this as well:
If I try to run regedit, however, I get UAC prompt and I can run regedit with no issues. Same for mmc.exe (I can run it from \Windows\system32 and get an UAC prompt). This makes, no sense, but my Win10 is complete train-wreck now. I also now, that if restart everything will be OK. Any ideas what's going on?
Edit: If I r-click Windows Explorer in task manager, and do "Restart" then after explorer restart the problem gets fixed.
