Mark Russinovich, the brilliant co-mind behind of SysInternals and author of a vast array of extremely helpful utilities, just published a new utility that has already found a comfortable home among those utilities that I use on a daily basis.  This new one is called AccessChk.  This awesome tool will help you secure your system by allowing you to verify the kinds of access permissions that a user has (be they read or modify permissions) for files, directories, Registry keys, and Windows services.

I've been wanting a tool like this for some time, but never took the time to write anything.  Thanks, Mark, for yet another ultra-uber-helpful utility.

Speaking of helpful utilities, does anyone know of one that does the following?  I have long wanted an easy way to see a utility that I'll call PolicyChk which I could use to see which Group Policies a user/group has rights assigned (either directly or via group membership).  There have been times uncountable wherein I wanted to grant a user the same polciy rights as another user (such as ASPNET), but didn't know which rights to assign without laborious manual examination of the various policy settings looking for the account and it's various group memberships.