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[Charlie Poole <charlie@xxxxxxxxx>]

** Changed in: nunitv2
       Status: New => Confirmed

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/681173

Title:
  better error messages for UAC/permission problems

Status in NUnit V2 Test Framework:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Sometimes NUnit has permissions problems with directories, and can't run tests. 

Windows User Account Control (UAC) tries to sandbox and isolate which EXEs can touch which locations inside AppData. I'm not 100% sure how this mechanism works, but I believe if an AppData directory is created with one EXE, and then a different EXE tries to access it, UAC will prevent it. 

This could be the source of the problem. It could be some other directory permissioning problem. The bottom line is, when this occurs, and NUnit can't load the assemblies or run tests, it's fixed by right-clicking on NUnit and choosing "run as administrator". Once you run it once as administrator, it fixes up the directory UAC permissions and then it shouldn't have this problem. Another solution is to delete the directories under appdata and then re-run. 

It might be nice if NUnit had some support for understanding it didn't have proper permissions to directories it needs, so it could throw a more sensible error. ("UAC is preventing me from touching this directory, either delete it or run NUnit as administrator"). However, I admit I have no idea how NUnit would detect this situation.