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2017-05-28

Avoiding Mysterious "Permission denied" Errors During Windows Development: Check Your Services!

This is a short post to answer a question I've seen go un-answered, or incorrectly answered, on at least three major programming forums.

If, while developing on Windows (regardless of IDE or programming tool), you can compile your program the 'first time' -- in Eclipse, mingw, golang, whatever -- and run it, but the next compile/run cycle you get "Permission denied" from the linker -- check that you don't have the "Application Experience" service disabled. It must be set to Manual, Automatic, or Automated (delayed start)... just not Disabled. Otherwise you'll experience this issue, regardless of language, compiler, or IDE, at least on Windows 7.

If you're like me you might be in the habit of turning off all sorts of Windows Services on your personal machines to minimize the background crap going on. It's always a matter of tuning to determine what's really required and what isn't. For programming with rapid edit/build/run/debug cycles, it's common to run into the permission issue described above.

I have no idea (nor does anyone else, it would seem --Microsoft isn't telling on its own forums) exactly why this service must be enabled to prevent the OS from locking a recently-terminated program executable on disk.

Perhaps (and this is a wild-ass guess), due to the way Application Experience monitors programs, to report if they crash, there's some other OS component in Windows that is waiting for a handshake from the Application Experience service before letting the executable be removed. This might make sense if one needs to send dumps of the .exe or something as part of a crash report.

Anyways... no one elsewhere has reported a definitive answer to this, so I'm noting it here mostly for myself, for posterity. I've run into it at least 3 times on various Windows systems doing development and it's highly annoying. Usually it's been a few years since I set up my box and I've forgotten how I solved it the last time...


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