I was just writing a utility assembly for the startup handling of my applications. That thing is called ...Startup.dll
, which kind of made sense to me and resides within a folder called Startup
in my source code hierarchy. No problem that far. Things started to behave weirdly when I created a small test app, a separate project in a subfolder of the Startup
folder. Suddenly I got an error from Visual Studio: CS0016, … can’t write to file ...\test.startup.exe
: access denied.
Usually this kind of problem has something to do with the funny methods that VS uses to access IntelliSense information for the IDE. That’s been a known problem in VS.NET 2003 for a long time and although I was using v2005, I thought maybe it had to do with that. Restarted, looked around… no change. I tried to create another project in another place and found out bit by bit that actually the path where the project was stored was the issue here. To make a long story short: I found that McAfee VirusScan was the source of the problem. I’m using the Enterprise 8 version, no idea about others. That thing has a feature called “Access protection”, which performs some port blocking and others functions. Under the option name Prevent access to suspicious startup items (.exe) it implements a protection for the Startup
folder… but not only for the Startup
folder, but for all folders that are called Startup
. Wow. By configuring the access protection via the VirusScan Console, it’s possible to switch that option off and everything’s back to normal. Now back to my startup utility :-)