access denied problem with 'my docs' directory

Hi all, I was trying to help this guy the other day whose system crashed and lost all his desktop icons and the contents to his 'my documents' folder, getting access denied. He was running xp home.

I rebuilt his system with a new drive (he had backed up some of his data) but I told him I would try to retrieve his data from the original one.. I put his drive as a slave on my system (xp pro) and it came up just fine except when trying to open up his doc folder still getting the "acccess denied" again.

I brought it up in safe mode and changed privs, gave privs to user 'everyone' and now can open the doc folder, even see some of the files and folders but when trying to open these up I'm getting the access denied again. I haven't tried changing privs down one level (that my work) but he has about 300 files-folders under the doc's directory.

I also tried xcopy (in command window) to try to move the files to another folder and maybe drop the permissions-attributes and that was no help as well. Gotta a bunch of access denieds again.

any ideas? ok maybe it is a stretch but is there a method or some software that will allow for a successful copy?

thanks in advance Dennis Meissner