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Could not write to output file -- Access is denied

I recently switched computers and copied all my projects over to my new local drive. I reformatted the computer I'm on now so it was pretty much a clean machine. Everything seemed to be working fine, but when I opened one of my projects that I had been running from my old machine, it would no longer compile, and I get the following error message:
Could not write to output file 'c:\Users\user\Documents\Projects\RegressionWeb\OnetouchUpload\obj\debug\OneTouchUpload.dll' -- 'Access is denied.'
I'm getting an error like that for each project I have in my solution. I'm also getting this error:
Unexpected error creating debug information file 'c:\Users\user\documents\projects\RegressionWeb\RegressionWeb\obj\Debug\RegressionWeb.PDB' Access is denied
I've searched high and low, and the only similar issues I could find online related specifically to ASP.NET and IIS, neither of which has anything to do with my project (My projects are class libraries of mostly NUnit tests with some support classes).
I am the administrator on my local machine. I have already taken ownership of every file in the project using takeown /f .\RegressionWeb /r /d y and also tried to ensure that nothing had a status of Read-only, but the following file threw an error when I tried changing the read-only property of it's parent folder:
An error occurred applying attributes to the file:
C:...\Regressionweb.sln.DotSettings.user
Access is denied
Basically this project was working perfectly and had no errors from my old computer. After copying over everything, this DotSettings.user file will not be modified, and Visual Studio can't write to any of the dll files. I'm sure the answer must lie in a Visual Studio setting somewhere. Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I think Karl has it right. I had a similar situation once, and what I did was delete the file in question, clean the solution, and then rebuild. If the project needs that file it should recreate it; in my case it didn't need it because it never recreated it, but the project ran just fine.
One other thing I would recommend; you may be selecting the read-only attribute of the parent folder off and selecting this setting to recurse through all sub-folders and files, but that doesn't mean that's what's happening. For all your sub-folders and files (especially the ones that are cropping up as errors) inspect each one individually and make sure the read-only attribute is off.

My money is on your files are read-only. Verify they are read-only and change them or add your files to a source control system and let them get handled by that.

I was able to get this working by closing Visual Studio and then opening it again, but being careful to run Visual Studio "As Administrator". To do this, from the Start menu, right click on Visual Studio and choose "Run as Administrator".

it seems that the same error is sometimes displayed when the app pool user doesn't have access to the %TMP%/%TEMP% folder.
You'll need to grant IIS_IUSRS read and modify access over the temp folder of the user the app pool is running as.
This could either be the temp folder in the app pool user's profile, e.g. c:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Local\Temp, or the system temp folder at c:\windows\temp.

See if it is related to this:Could not write to output file - Access is denied
. That would be a bit of a bugger to track down. In this case the project is self-referencing the dll and preventing access to the file.

This has a very simple solution, you just have to make sure that your directory name(folder name) is not the same as your file name. I created a folder by the name Pointers, my code was in a file pointers.cpp. When I compiled the code it kept showing the same error. I just had to change the directory or folder name to L1_pointers. You can change it to anything you want and it worked.

C# File.Copy access denied error

I am trying to copy files from nunit test build folder to nunit runtime folder but getting
Access denied error
I have a folder path setup like Testproject/bin/debug/something.config and tried the options below but its not working for me.
Deleted the bin folder and then rebuilt it.
Opened closed VS.
Deleted bin folder created new bin folder manually.
Tried to remove readonly in folder option but it again gets set to
readonly.
I found these worked for others in the thread
Unable to copy file. Access to the path is denied
I am also using SVN as source control.

One thing that you haven't tried is to run Visual Studio as an administrator. Right click on it, and select run as administrator.

Sounds like it was locked and abandoned.
I've used LockHunter to unlock files that Windows so often locks and abandons. Even after rebooting the files can sometimes remain locked by a process that no longer exists.
It will also tell you what applications have locked the file.

File redirection from Program data to AppData\Local\VirtualStore\ProgramData

I am using C# with .net 3.5
I am saving my program data in a file under: C:\Program Data\MyProgramName\fileName.xml
After installing and running my application one time I uninstalled it (during uninstallation I'm removing all the files from "program data")
and then I reinstall the application, and ran it.
The strange thig is that my application started as if the files in program data existed - means, I had old data in my app even though the data file was deleted.
When running:
File.Exists("C:\Program Data\MyProgramName\fileName.xml")
I got "true" even though I knew for sure that the file does not exist.
The thing became stranger when I ran the application as admin and then the file didn't exist.
After a research, I found out that when running my application with no admin priviliges instead of getting: "C:\Program Data\MyProgramName\fileName.xml" I get "C:\Users\userName\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\ProgramData\MyProgramName\fileName.xml"
and indeed there was a file that existed from the previous installation (that I obviously didn't delete ,because I didn't know it existed).
So apparentlly there is some virtual path to the file under program data.
EDIT :
I found out that after deleting the old file in the virtual store, my application is suddenly able to find the correct file. (I didn't make any changes in the file under Program Data.
My question is:
why is it happen.
How can I prevent it from happening
Thanks in advance

Do you actually have to write to the per-system Program Data folder instead of the per-user Application Data folder(s)?
You might want to take a look at Environment.GetFolderPath and the following Environment.SpecialFolders:
Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData - data folder for application data, synchronized onto domain controller if the user profile is roaming
Environment.SpecialFolder.LocalApplicationData - data folder for application data, local and not synchronized (useful for, for instance, caches)
EDIT:
Tested on Windows 7 x64, non-administrator user.
var appData = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonApplicationData);
var myFolder = Path.Combine(appData, "MyApp");
if(!Directory.Exists(myFolder)) Directory.CreateDirectory(myFolder);
File.WriteAllText(Path.Combine(myFolder, "Test.txt"), "Test.");
This does what is expected, ie. writes into C:\ProgramData\MyApp\Test.txt. As far as I can tell (Administrator mode Command Prompt), there's no UAC virtualization going on either.
Double edit:
I guess what's happened is that at some point an Administrator user has written the files into your ProgramData folder, and as such, UAC file system virtualization kicks in and redirects the non-administrator writes into the VirtualStore.
Does your uninstaller run as Administrator? If it does, you might have to check both the VirtualStore path for the user who initiates the uninstall, and the actual file system path for program data to remove. I'm not sure if there's an official way to do this, though...

I found the reason for the bug.
the application is trying to take ownership on the file and then the other file is created.
I removed that line and now everything works just fine.

.Net app.config file ignored when under c:\ProgramFiles\

I have a strange phenomen
I have .Net 4.0 app.
When the myapp.exe.config is under the normal programfiles folder it is ignored. Even if I delete it or write nonsense in it the myapp.exe works and it seems to me that values are taken from a previous installation.
When I copy the folder to e.g. to Desktop it works correct.
Edit: when I copy form c:programfiles\myapp\ to c:\programfiles\copy of myapp\ it works
It seems to be only a problem in the progamfile folder where a previous installation has benn made. (I guess)
Any ideas?
Best regards

Could you share your operating system with us? I have had similar problems in the past with an application (Win 2008). One simple work arround if you are not the system administrator, is to edit the .config file on another location, and then place it back.
Sometimes the content of a file is not really editted, however a copy is created with your changed on the back, which is confusing.

Most probably you are dealing with a case of "compatibility files" - in your Program Files folder you have a file saved in the Compatibility files view that is being read instead of your actual file.
Delete the compatibility files and everything should work correctly.
In this article, in the "how about the ugly part?" you will find described exactly your scenario.
Best regards

There is a folder
C:\Users\myuser\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\myapp
Where there was the config which was taken.
This "feature" comes that my app runs not as admin.
Read the comments to UAC.
This happens only to Win7 and Vista. Not on XP.
regards

File.Copy fails when copying a DLL that is not in use

I've built a winforms app (C#) that will take a list of file paths, and copy those files (from a different VS solution) to a new location (In a folder the user specifies) in the same directory structure they currently exist on local file system.
I use the Path class, Directory class etc and everything works wonderfully...except when it reaches a file path that points to a DLL.
The DLLs I am trying to copy are a part of the other solution, and that solution is not currently open.
I have tried restarting computer to make sure visual studio isn't somehow hooking into that DLL even after the solution is closed.
The DLL in question can be copied by regular manual means (i.e. copy and paste shortcut).
So short of creating a batch file in the program, and running xcopy on that DLL path, I don't know of a way to get this to work.
From what I have found from google searches (which isn't much on this particular situation), File.Copy() should work..
Any help would be wonderful, even if it is a link to a duplicate question I may have over looked.
Thanks!
-The error message is: The process cannot access the file [insert file path] because it is being used by another process (The path is definitely correct also)
-Just downloaded and tried to search for the DLL name with Process Explorer.. I also ran a similar exe from command prompt to no avail. It claims nothing is using it. That's why I am utterly baffled by this. Also, I just checked the permissions and everything looks great (i.e. Full Control, owner effective permissions)
-It does not handle open files. It basically build the correct src and dest paths and does a File.Copy() on those. How would I go about handling open files? I'm sure I could figure out if it was open, but what would I do it it were open?

It is not complaining about the file you're trying to copy, it is complaining about the file that you're trying to overwrite with the copy. Lots of candidates for that, virus scanners always get very excited about new DLLs, for example. Or it is loaded into a process, the typical failure mode for trying to implement your own auto-updater.
You can rename the target file to make your copy succeed.

Are you in vista or win7? If so, Check your 'User Account Control Settings'. Sometimes this can interfere with .NET security options and prevent file operations that would otherwise work.

As well as Process Explorer, I would use Process Monitor also from Microsoft so you can see what is happening at the point of failure and allows you to see if anything else is accessing the dll.
Possible culprits are
the program you are running,
your antivirus package
a virus.
If the path it is complaining about is the destination path, then is is possible that the path is too long?
Also, when using Process Explorer, make sure you have enabled the option to show details for all processes and not just your own.

I just ran into this issue as well. I tried copying a .DLL from an FTP server to a local directory (replacing the existing one) and for the life of me I could not get it to work. Keeps giving me an 'Access Denied code: 5' Error.
I then realized that the .DLL on the FTP server was not marked as hidden while the .DLL I was trying to replace was marked as hidden.
Once I changed the local one to also be visible. I had no more issues.
So my solution is:
Make sure both files are visible.
Hope this helps someone