I’ve been running Windows 8 Pro on my laptop for a week now and really digging it, so I decided to update my main system.

Everything went well until I tried to install some software, when I encountered a pop-up error saying “The extended attributes are inconsistent.” Well of course they are! All I needed to do was to homogenize the attributes and all would be well right? Wait, what?

So I’ll spare you the long story, but it turns out this can happen if you install a new theme (I picked a lovely autumn one!) that changes your sound settings. Changing the theme back to the default one should fix it, but an even less drastic solution is to open your sound settings (search for “Change System Sounds” in the Settings category) scroll down to Windows User Account Control, and set the sound to (None). That should make the problem go away.

For a detailed explanation of what’s going on, check out this link where some guy who is my hero spent a lot of time tracking down what the heck was going on:

https://chentiangemalc.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/case-of-the-broken-uac-prompt-extended-attributes-are-inconsistent-2/

Hopefully Microsoft will patch this issue out soon, but until then it’s a pretty easy fix.