I am being driven completely nuts by a weird network permissions problem
and wonder whether anyone here could help. I'm really at the limit of my
'expertise' here.

I have a NAS at home (Netgear ReadyNAS Duo) on which I store all my data
files. We access these from either a desktop or laptop (I using those
as terminals essentially), and use the NAS to stream content to TV/music
players; working like a dream for several years. But a few months ago I
replaced the laptop with a second-hand Lenovo, running Windows 7 XP Pro,
and ever since have been having problems over write access to the NAS,
from the laptop only. The weird thing is that it's intermittent (ie some
days I boot it up and ir plays ball perfectly; other days it gives
problems). The sort of stuff I'm getting is as follows:

I have my data folder on the NAS configured as drive P:\. Some
subfolders of that never give problems (eg I have a folder entitled "P:
\Data\Misc files from laptop for filing on NAS" which always works!) but
other subfolders often don't; giving me messsages like "You don't have
permission to save in this location - Contact the administrator to
obtain permission". Documents (Word/Excel etc) will often open as read-
only (sometimes pre-warning me that another user already has the
document open, which is a lie!); whereas that same document will opens
fine on the desktop.

I've tried creating new NAS sub folders from the laptop/desktop but
neither seems to help.

And which 'administrator' am I supposed to 'contact' - the laptop's or
NAS? (The laptop has one user account, which is administrator level
obviously).

I've tried looking at the Properties of the various folders and they all
look the same to me. I'd happily globally reset all the subfolders in P:
\Data to give full RW access...

Really stumped here; not least because of the intermittent nature of the
problem. I'm assuming the problem is with the lapto rather than the NAS
but can't be 100% certain. Is it worth reinstalling Windows on it? I
really need to start from scratch and troubleshoot this problem from the
top down - Anybody?


Oh BTW: on a separate issue (trying to minimise my OT posts here!),
anyone care to recommend a file searching utility that will work on my
network drive? The Windows search tool is complete pants... I've googled
a few possibles but would prefer personal recommendation.


--
David