I have a strange problem. I run a lot of portable apps on my work laptop which I do not have admin rights on. Portables have worked fine this way for years.
Today I came in and there were some issues with the local network and I reset my Windows password, and now many of the portable apps will not start, giving me the following error:
NSIS Error
Error writing temporary file. Make sure your temp folder is valid.
The temp folder is fine. I can write to it and many programs work fine and read/write from it. However a few do not.
Portableapps.com launcher gives this error when I try to launch it form Start.exe. But it works fine if I launch it from /PortableApps/PortableApps.com/PortableAppsPlatform.exe.
This is all very confusing.
Apps that work:
- Bulk Rename Utility
- CCleaner
- ColorCop
- foobar2000
- Great News
- Portable Apps (PortableAppsPlatform.exe)
- Teamviewer
- Winrar
Apps that do not:
- Album Art Downloader
- Chrome
- Feedreader
- Gimp
- MP3tag
- Notepad++
- Portable Apps (Start.exe)
- USBWebserver
- VLC
Any suggestions on figuring this out? Not having admin rights is going to limit what I can do.
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That error on startup means that Start.exe was unable to write to your TEMP directory. This usually means a permissions error on the TEMP directory. Running the PortableAppsPlatform.exe directly does not solve the issue, it merely bypasses the check which is in Start.exe.
You will need to set permissions on the TEMP directory to ensure your login has full access. If you reset your password via anything other than a standard Windows login and password change, it could have messed up the permissions.
This will affect all sorts of apps whether portable or not. Being able to write to it in Exporer doesn't necessarily mean you have proper permissions set either.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Win 7 Enterprise, plenty of space, memory, etc...
Interestingly, today (worked fine yesterday) I am getting "The TEMP directory on this computer does not seem to exist" when I attempt to start using "Start.EXE".
But if I go to the environment variables, PATH = C:\Windows\TEMP.
Weird!
Creating a TempForPortableApps folder in the \PortableApps directory (aka next to Start.exe) does not work solve the issue for me.
But running PortableAppsPlatform.exe does.
FYI,
G