I know my reply is a bit tardy, but I've been working sun up to sun down the past two weeks and havn't had time to check the forums until now.

Thanks for all the advice. I didn't encrypt the files (luckily), but I was worried that that might be what making the files private does. Now that I know that that isn't true, I think I will take annihilator_god's advice and try to get them through linux. My current distrobution is about three years old and doesn't do NTFS, but I've been wanting to get a new one for a while anyway. If that doesn't work I'll try NTFSDOS.

I had already tried logging in as "Administrator" from the login screen (I had the welcome screen disabled as well, so the login is a NT style username and password dialog)

As for giving family members limited accounts, I did this, but I didn't see any way of taking away write permissions from selected files but not others. This is not so much of a problem now, as I am not living at home anymore.

I can't get to work on it right away, because I'm taking a VERY full load at college (using the standard on in two out formula its 63 hours of work a week, but it seems like much more, because I'm in several lit classes...not my forte). Luckily it's only for another 4 weeks, so I should be able to work on it after that, and I'll post how it works out.

Thanks again for the help