Thanks, I will go the win32security.SetFileSecurity route. It seems a pity that I can't use platform independant code to sort this out but I guess you're saying that I've managed to get my files into a non standard state that needs non standard code to sort it out. I wonder how winamp/itunes manage to bypass it.
Barney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
