Error writing to file

[danBhentschel]

One of our customers is getting an error during an upgrade install:

Error writing to file: <filename>. Verify that you have access to that directory.

The customer was upgrading a per-user install with a new per-user install. The Windows account he was using is a local Administrator on the PC. I went over the permissions of both the file he was trying to access, and the containing directory, with the customer in a phone call. Apparently his user account and the Administrators group both had full control of the directory and file in question.

I can't even seem to cause this situation in my own environment, regardless of the permissions I set on files and folders in that area, I CAN reproduce the following error:

The installer has insufficient privileges to access this directory: <dirname>. The installation cannot continue. Log on as administrator or contact your system administrator.

But this is a different error from what the customer was seeing. In order to get him past the problem, I had him rename the entire installation directory out of the way. After this, the installation proceeded without issue.

Can anyone suggest how this error could have occurred?

- dan

[Dan]

Hi Dan,

Can you please ask your client to disable the anti-virus when performing the installation and see if this makes any change?

Also, in order to have a better view about this, can you please send us the .AIP (project file) and a full verbose log of the installation process to support at advancedinstaller dot com so we can investigate it? If it contains confidential information you can send us a small test project which reproduce this behavior.

Best regards,
Dan

[jay]

Hi Dan, I can reproduce your customer’s error consistently. Windows 10 with free BitDefender anti-virus.

FYI Dan (from AdvancedInstaller), I disabled BitDefender, but no joy. I had to completely uninstall it and was then able to install our application without the error. Also, this happens with our current year product, running AdvancedInstaller version 14.4 Enterprise Edition. Our prior year product, using AdvancedInstaller 13.8.1 Enterprise Edition will install without this error occurring. Perhaps a change in installation approach is setting off some heuristic algorithm in the anti-virus? Still, I lay this at their feet – AdvancedInstaller works for us with many other anti-virus products (Avast, AVG, TrendMicro to name a few).

Install / upgrade issues aside, all of our products have a nightmarish time trying to patch updates in with BitDefender on the computer. We see some assemblies updated then the installer.exe gets quarantined from the temp folder location and the resulting version number in Apps & Features does not get updated resulting in an endless loop of attempting to update when launching the program.

BitDefender has not been overly responsive to our requests for assistance with this, so we are on the verge of instructing our customers to avoid at all costs. Hate to go that route, perhaps other reports of significant issues would assist. What I do know is these issues are cropping up for a number of our customers as we roll out a promising new product, and eating up a significant amount of our support staff time.

[Daniel]

Hello and welcome to our forums,

Thank you for your follow up on this thread.

I can assure you the detections are false positive ones. We already reported this kind of behavior to BitDefender team since three weeks ago, but unfortunately without any resolution from their part until now. I can confirm you that they are very unresponsive. All that they replied us weekly since our report is that our submission is currently under investigation.

Hopefully they will manage to fix this issue in their detection algorithms.

All the best,
Daniel