Visual Studio 2013. You do not have sufficient privilege to access IIS web sites on your machine

Question

I just installed VS2013 and turned on IIS 7 on my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 machine. When trying to open a solution I get:

Creation of the virtual direct

Answer 1

The root cause of this error for me was that IIS was installing the config folder on a network shared drive at my workplace. I had to change this to use a local drive and it fixed it.

IIS creates an IISExpress folder in your %USER_HOME%/Documents folder (which for me was a shared drive)

For me this issue was solved by uninstalling IIS, and clearing everything IIS related in the registry. I then had to change my Documents drive in Registry (KHCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders) from a shared drive to a local drive (C:\Users[profile]\Documents).

Then reinstall IIS. It should create an IISExpress in the new Documents folder.

Answer 2

Visual Studio 2015: Just start Visual Studio "as administrator" that worked for me without having to make any changes to VS or registry.

Answer 3

There is a simple answer. Make sure you start VS 20xx as an administrator. This is required for Azure development as well.

Answer 4

The highest voted answer here did not work for me. I've recently upgraded to Windows 10 (ungh) and when I went to:

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv

...I did not get a permissions pop up. Further more when I tried to change the permissions manually, most of the options were not available or greyed out.

The end fix was to click into each folder individually inside the inetsrv directory. When I did this I received a pop up for each folder where I could gain access.

Restarted VS and voilà!

Answer 5

I had tried each of the steps recommended and didn't work. So, my last resource was to review the registry to find out if my user was pointing to a temp or cache folder. Some posts were suggesting to check on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE; but those were. So, I finally found it by going into the HKEY_CURRENT_USER as recommended by boilers222:
Opened registry (CTRL-R, regedit, OK) Navigated to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\ Found the Personal key was pointing to "\OurServer\RedirectedFolders\MyName\MyDocuments" Selected the Personal key, right clicked on it, and selected Modify
Entered a location pointing to my user's documents file: "%USERPROFILE%\Documents\" Clicked OK and closed the registry editor When I opened Visual Studio and opened my solution, it loaded without the "unable to access the IIS metabase" error.

Answer 6

Tried everything suggested, finally turned out we had to install IIS 10.0 Express with Application Compatibility Database installed by default

Screenshot:

Programs screenshot