WinXP read-only misery

[magnate]

I'm having a really odd problem. I'm running a server on a winXP machine (SP2), and it keeps crashing with "cannot open file". So I check the permissions of the Dom2 folder and the game folder, and the read-only box is shaded, meaning that some but not all of the files in those folders are read-only. So I try to un-check it and apply the changes, and nothing happens! The properties of each folder still claims that some files are read-only.

The server loads up ok and runs one turn fine, but then crashes again as soon as it tries to host the next turn.

Further investigation reveals that every folder on my machine has this shaded read-only attribute! I haven't installed anything recently, and Norton is certain there are no viruses. Does anyone know what it might be? The only thing I can think of is that I did a big Windows update recently (18 security updates) - one was the "windows malicious software removal tool" - is this known to prevent Dom2 writing to disk?? Or maybe it's windows update itself? I used to switch it off but I've recently left it running in the background.

Just thought I'd see if anyone else has found this oddity of having read-only files hidden in every folder. It doesn't stop the Dom2 client writing turn files, but it stops the server from hosting.

Weird.

CC